What Was Promised (28 page)

She didn’t find it. Leeds was full of echoes. The back-to-backs, where the kids kicked rag-footballs hell for leather and played their made-up games; the covered markets, where the costers hawked cuts of meat and cloth, choice or cheap; and the forthright people, whose warmth embraced her but whose thresholds she never crossed, never being invited: none of it was foreign to her. It was intimate but faint, as though she’d lived it all herself, not only in another city, but in another life.

She liked Leeds, but not its University. She was too reticent to shine in lectures, too doubtful to excel on paper. Her tutors had no time for her. She made friends with difficulty. Her hall of residence was Moor Grange in Headingley, a Victorian conversion, handsome to look at from a distance but internally unpleasant, with disused gaslights that still leaked a residual stench in close weather, and dank parqueted corridors that echoed under the heels of girls who shopped in shops, not markets, and whose voices jostled for position, diffident or confident, but always – to Iris – seeming driven by a need to hunt out common ground, a reassuring hierarchy of grammar schools, holidays, paternal occupations, books and clothes and boys and places which Iris had never read or worn or seen or known to fancy.

The evening she arrived in Leeds: that was when she found Semlin.

Her train had been delayed, first in leaving London and again later that afternoon while crossing some interminable process of Midlands mining towns. It was dark by the time she reached Moor Grange and the porter was short with her. Iris gave her name and received her keys and dour directions, but somehow she went wrong. She missed her floor and climbed on as far as the attics, which the girls called the Garrets, where the corridors admitted little natural light, and the rooms – she heard it later – were uncomfortably low, their ceilings gathering down to filthy lattice-leaded windows.

She put down her cases to pat along the walls for light. She found a timer switch, pressed it and hurried on unhindered, peering down at her keys and up at the doors, none of which was hers and some of which were already posted with the names of eager new inhabitants. She had gone half the hallway’s length when the lamps flickered, the plunger by the stairwell forewarning of its depletion, and Iris just had time to catch the name on the next door.
J. Semlin
, she read, and then the lights went out.

She stood trembling. She told herself she was wrong, but she knew what she’d seen, and as the dark receded – her eyes accustoming to the dim cast of the next window – the door became half-visible. She made herself go closer. There was the name, handwritten in inked capitals on cartridge paper, the scrap inserted into a brass slot meant for something more enduring. She could hear nothing from inside. She raised her hand to knock and then lowered it and turned back the way she’d come. Somewhere along the walls she found another switch and went on without looking back through the reinvigorated light.

She never met J. Semlin. She listened for the name, at Moor Grange, at the University and in town, but Iris never heard anyone call for her or speak of her and she never saw her. Later – years later – she asked someone about the name, a man who knew about such things, and he told her that it might be Balkan or German, that there were Semlins in the East and that some of those had gone to Canada. And once, at the end of her time in Leeds, she went back up to the Garrets, meaning to knock, but only once, and that was more than enough.

In a way it was nothing. Nothing really happened except that the door haunted her. Its name was hers, but not hers.
Semlin
. It was her possession, being her invention. It was her secret and it had no right to be out in the world. It was like meeting an abandoned friend in a new place, or coming suddenly on a mirror in an unfamiliar house. It was like seeing a ghost. She thought of the door too often, too much for comfort, and as the door nagged at her she began to think and dream of other things. Semlin led back to the street of flowers, to the hole in Long Debris, to Bernadette, and Pond.

She kept Dad from everyone. She told no one about him until she left college, and then, of those she’d met at Leeds, only Harry, and Connie, her one best friend. She met Connie in the autumn term, in Kirkgate Market, at Turner’s Ladies’ Intimates.

Iris was looking at the lingerie; looking without touching, because all but the most functional items were beyond her means (half the bras she owned then were still rubberised home-mades; her best were Marks and Sparks discounts, in grim melanoid flesh-tones). Close by, Mrs Turner and a tall girl were discussing stockings.

‘I don’t do them,’ Mrs Turner said, and the girl folded her arms, bracing for disagreement.

‘Well, that’s a pity. I’ve tried the shops. Women do wear them.’

‘Ladies don’t.’

‘How would you know? Oh look, I haven’t come to argue about it. I just thought, in the markets . . . I don’t suppose you’d know who has them?’

‘Mesh,’ said Mrs Turner, and others besides Iris heard her then, the man with the dogs by Scarr’s Drapery (the dogs following their master’s gaze), the women by the corsets. ‘You’re a student, aren’t you? What do you want with them?’

‘That’s hardly your business, is it?’

‘It’s my business, if I’m saying what I know.’

‘Well are you going to, or not?’

The coster sucked her cheeks. The girl’s face was flaming. She stood too straight for comfort, as if to draw together the tatters of her dignity. She looks like the guards at Buckingham Palace, Iris thought, like a guard in rotten weather; boylike, toylike, ridiculous.

‘Try Loughton’s, over there. They do theatricals,’ Mrs Turner said, and close by in the roofed-in gloom a woman chuckled. Iris became aware that the people around her had become an audience, an unkind one, wanting nothing good, hungry for comeuppance; and with awareness came regret, for Iris, at having thought of the girl unkindly herself.

‘Mind how you go, love,’ Mrs Turner said, as the girl turned away; and then, raising her iron-flat coster’s voice, for the benefit of her crowd, ‘You might want to mind your manners, and all.’

‘Oh? Why’s that?’

‘Men like young ladies with good manners. You talk with them as you talk with me, you won’t be getting far with them and they won’t go far with you. And then those mesh stockings of yours, they won’t be here nor there, will they?’

The girl walked briskly. She had reached the market gates, was unruffling a brolly, before Iris caught her up.

‘Excuse me, are you alright? I saw what happened,’ she said, and the girl turned to her; on her, almost, with the shoppers shouldering around them, still market-thick in the high street.

‘Did you? I hope you had a good laugh at my expense. Save some fun for your friends at Moor Grange, won’t you? I’m sure they’ll thank you for the entertainment.’

Her cheeks were still flushed, Iris saw, and her eyes were wet; but not miserable, as Iris’s would have been. Agitated, not chastened.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean to . . . I didn’t laugh, anyway. I thought it was horrible,’ Iris said, and before she could say anything else the girl was shrugging and glancing away.

‘Well, it was my own fault. I asked the wrong woman for my sluttish stockings, didn’t I? And I should have shut up when I had the chance, but I never can seem to. Still, it wasn’t pleasant. I don’t think I’ll be back in a hurry. Gosh, I’m dying to sit down. I suppose that’s the trouble with markets, isn’t it? Do you think someone around here would serve us tea, or will word of me have spread already?’

Iris paid for the teas. The girl had cigarettes.

‘You’re very kind. You’re an angel, actually,’ the girl said, ‘or a knight in shining armour. Which would make me your damsel in distress, wouldn’t it? Or your soul in need of saving. Are you?’

‘Am I what?’

‘A good Samaritan, always saving Philistines. Was it Philistines with him? Anyhow, you look like you might be.’

‘I don’t see how,’ Iris said. ‘I don’t know how. To save people, I mean. I don’t know much of anything. My tutor seems to think I’m more of a Philistine.’

‘You’re lucky. Mine thinks I’m the damsel, and the story is he eats them. I’m Connie.’

‘Iris.’

‘Angel, then. Knights get pretty names, like Lancelot or Percival, but Iris is beautiful.’

‘Is it?’

‘Of course it is. Flowers and rainbows. Not like Constance. Who chose it?’

‘My mum.’

‘There you are. Daddy chose mine. You can tell he wasn’t keen. Nothing’s much fun if it’s constant, is it? Miss Constance Nuisance Interruption, that’s what he used to call me.’

They nursed their teas. The place was cosy, the one window drizzle-fogged. The smell of fried breakfasts, thick as lard.

‘Why were you buying them?’ Iris asked, ‘the stockings?’

‘Oh . . . it sounds silly now. There’s a fellow I’ve been seeing, at the Medical School. He said something about liking them. Not that I’m doing it for him, I don’t dress for men. He did spark my interest, though. That woman was right, I do go in for the theatrical. I wanted to see Richard’s face. Gobsmacked, is that what you say? Do you have a fellow?’

‘No,’ Iris said, meaning
Never.

‘You should come along to the Med School, you’ll have young doctors swarming all over you.’

‘I don’t know if I want to be swarmed.’

‘It’s alright, they don’t sting, not unless you want them to. They’re gentlemen most of the time, just a bit full of bravado. I think it must be the prospect of future eminence. It’s charming, in any case. Will you? Come along?’

Afterwards, walking to Connie’s bike, Iris remembered the unasked question. ‘How do you know where I live?’

‘I’ve seen you around. You stand out a bit, always by yourself. It makes you look brave.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You look it. Women are expected to seek safety in numbers, one way or another. You don’t do what’s expected of you. That’s bravery, isn’t it? And I suppose you won’t take it the wrong way if I say you dress a little differently. The grammar school girls all look the same. Like eggs. No, hens – pushy, pecky, henpecked hens. I’ve digs at Moorfield Lodge. We’re almost next door neighbours. The Lodge is a pit.’

‘The Grange is too. I don’t have any friends there. I couldn’t tell anyone about you, even if I wanted to.’

‘You could always tell me instead,’ Connie said. ‘I’ll laugh at myself tomorrow. I will, you wait. I’ve had plenty of practice.’

It wasn’t common ground, Kirkgate market. Connie didn’t belong there, and never went back again, but nor did she share much with the other girls (
studentesses
, Iris’s tutor called them). Her father was a diplomat, twice unhappily married, and his only child had grown up with consequent unhappiness at an expensive but ill-suited range of international and boarding schools, in Manila, Yorkshire and Sussex. Connie felt as far beyond the small worlds of the Lodge and the Grange as Iris felt below them.

A fortnight after they met, Iris went with Connie to the halls of the Leeds School of Medicine. Connie had set up dinner with her man, Richard, and a friend, at an Indian restaurant not far from East Parade.

‘His name’s Harry. I think you might like him, but – listen – dinners can be awkward. They’re a shade too obvious, and I don’t want that making you nervous. We’d do better to mix it up a bit.’

‘I’m not wearing mesh stockings, if that’s what you think.’

‘I wish you would. No, I’ve a plan. I bought some fizz up for the term, look here, there’s still a bottle to go. We take it and infiltrate their halls. The night porter’s darling, he’s let me up before. We catch the men half-decent and force the drink on them. Inevitable merriment ensues. What do you think?’

‘I don’t –’

‘Don’t think. Trust me, it’s ironclad. Ready?’

They were scrunched up in front of Connie’s mirror, Connie dazzling in the forty-watt light, Iris all done up, unsmiling, bereft of herself.

‘Connie, I think I might just go home. You won’t mind, will you? I’m not like you,’ she said, and Connie cocked her head at their dim, different reflections. She reached up and stroked their necks. One hand on Iris, one on herself.

‘You can’t now,’ she said. ‘You’re too beautiful for home. Look at you. My angel.’

The night porter wasn’t darling. Iris stood on the lamp-lit steps while Connie argued, and by the time she’d given up they were late for the restaurant and had to make a run for it, clutching their handbags and the bottle, excusing themselves through the evening crowds and the things the crowds called after them, and it was awful, but at the end of it was Harry.

He wasn’t much to look at then, although he has one of those faces that gain with age. Now, ten years on, Iris finds herself – against the odds, she thinks – married to a handsome man. It seems a mistake to her, the way their looks have diverged, an error on the part of nature. It’s a glitch that – bit by bit – is driving them apart. She has been hurt by Harry’s looks, more than once, but she takes pleasure in them all the same. The pleasure surprises her, as hunger often does: sometimes, when Iris is looking after those who count on her to do so, she’ll forget to eat until the small hours, when the pangs strike through her. She should take better care of herself, Iris. Or someone should.