What Was Promised (35 page)

They limp on, conversationless. The crowd is hard going, a bog of damp backsides and brollies, and it’s only as they near the shop that Sybil sees someone waiting. Now and then he glances in, as if Don hasn’t opened up: but Don is never late, Donald Fisher loves the early bird, he marks its footsteps well and forever sings its praises.

‘Him again,’ Trudi mutters, and the loiterer turns. His face clears as he sees them. He says nothing, but takes off his cap and steps back for them to enter. It’s only then, as he follows, that Sybil remembers him as the man who sheltered from the rain.

‘Late!’ Don barks, tapping his wrist. ‘Punctuality!’

‘Sorry, Mr Fisher,’ ?Trudi says, and with game girlishness, ‘Patience is a virtue, sir.’

‘I don’t want your bleeding virtue. You look a shambles,’ Don rumbles, and then, noticing the early-doors customer, lowers his voice and nods sidelong. ‘Go on. Work your women’s magic.’

In the drab back room they share a lipstick by the mirror.

‘Who is he, then?’ Sybil asks, and Trudi makes a face.

‘Some dirty old man. He was in and out last week.’

‘He was here yesterday, too.’

‘He never buys nothing,’ Trudi says. ‘Never even asks, just looks. I know that’s what Don wants Dollies for, but still. They give me the creeps, voyeurs.’

Sybil regards herself. ‘He’s not that old,’ she says, ‘I don’t know about the dirty.’

Trudi is easing off her shoes, wedging in cotton wool. She looks up wickedly.

‘Marry or shag or throw off a cliff???’ she asks, but Sybil shrugs. There’s nothing about the man that makes the game worth playing. Already she finds it hard to picture him. He’s nothing, no trouble, not flash. Dressed for some discreet business, though Sybil can’t place what that business might be.

‘Maybe he’s an undertaker,’ she murmurs, but Trudi is packing away, smacking her lips, all done.

‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a shit. He’s all yours if you want him,’ she says, and blows a farewell kiss.

Sybil trails after her. The man is where they left him. Phyllis and Tess are at their desks, Trudi is settling, and they’re all doing their best to look right through him. Nor does the man look at them, though he meets Sybil’s eye. She smiles, meaning little by it – it’s what she always does – but the man smiles back, and then he ducks his head and comes and sits.

He clears his throat. The girls are listening. Sybil sees that he knows it. ‘I’d like to book a holiday,’ he says, eventually.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘you’re in the right place.’ She leans forward and adds, ‘It’s alright, it’s not like the dentist,’ but the man just blinks, as if he doesn’t get it or thinks the joke’s on him.

She tries again. ‘Did you have somewhere in mind, sir?’

The man nods. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I hoped you might advise me. I’m Sydney.’

‘There you are, then. Go there,’ Sybil says brightly, and regrets it as she does. Trudi chortles at her post and the man’s head drops. He fiddles with his cap. You can’t but feel sorry for him.

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘Forget it. I’m Sybil,’ Sybil says, and is relieved when he stops with his fiddling. She gets out some papers. ‘How about I give you some choices, you tell me what you like. Alright, ready? Mountains or sea? City or surf? Beach or Botticelli?’

The questions are Don’s and loathsome, but on she goes with them. The man answers a couple but he’s hardly listening. He’s staring at her, as if searching her for something. He looks like he might be hard of hearing, or as if the words she reads don’t matter to him at all, because what he hears her say is something else entirely.

‘I’ve always wanted to fly,’ he puts in, and she has to laugh, but it’s alright, he smiles. ‘That must sound strange to you.’

‘No,’ she lies, but of course it does. He is strange, the way some people are. He’s one of those who aren’t quite at home in the world.

‘I know,’ he says, ‘I’ve got it. The trip of a lifetime.’

‘That’s what you’d like?’

‘That’s it. What would you recommend?’

She recommends the cruises. She lays out the bumph for the five-star liners, the garish floating palaces of the Atlantic and Pacific, the excursions by seaplane. She tries the deluxe packages, the gaudy extravagances, the grand hotels of the New World and the Old. She lays them all out on the desk and talks them up, while he sits in silence.

‘If you were me,’ he says, ‘if you were in my shoes, what would you choose?’

She smiles properly. ‘But I’m not, am I?’

‘But if you were.’

‘Well, if you’re really asking
me
, Jamaica.’

He asks her why, and so she tells him. As best she can she describes the blue mountains and green hills which she has never seen. The congregated peoples, the hay-warm smell of cane and the trees where you can help yourself. The towns with names like sweets or cocktails or happy-ever-afters. The fresh warmth of the mornings and the name of the town where her mother was born. She tells him too much, but there is a freedom even in the telling: once she’s started she can’t find it in herself to stop. She smiles again when she does.

‘I don’t know what’s up with me. Talking your ear off!’ she says. ‘Anyway, that’s just me. That’s my dream trip, not yours. You need to think about yourself.’

He stands and puts on his coat. ‘I will,’ he says.

‘Are you leaving, then?’

‘I’ll come back. Thank you. Goodbye,’ he says, and just like that he’s gone.

You don’t know Sybil. Don’t think you know the daughter just because you met the mother. There are likenesses of look and gesture, but those things are innocent. An infant might have those things without knowing what it has or does. Sybil never learned how to be her mother’s daughter.

Bernadette aspired to dignity. At best Sybil musters pride. She takes pride in knowing how to fight. She fights for herself, most of the time, and if there’s time to spare, then fuck it, she’ll fight for anyone who can’t stand up for themselves. Even Sydney: Sybil would rather fight for him than pity him.

If she had known her mother then she would grieve for her, but she didn’t and cannot. She can only imagine grief. What she feels is less realised. It is loss that drives her, and – on the many mornings when loss is insufficient – anger.

On better days, as today, she doesn’t go straight home. She buys groceries and walks up through Camden Town, through the no-ballgames courts and the wealth-of-Empire terraces, to the flat on St Mark’s Square, where her uncle used to tell her stories of swift-catchers and safe harbours, and where her father now lives on, alone in his brother’s place.

Someone needs to clean for Clarence. Someone needs to see he eats, someone needs to talk to him and let air into those hollow rooms, and if Jem does more than most men, still, it does Sybil good.

She presses the bell and waits. The rain has run itself out. The sun is on St Mark’s ragstone, though shadow quarters the churchyard. The door opens behind her.

‘You’re late,’ Dad says. ‘It been raining?’

‘Yeah,’ Sybil says, ‘so you going to let me in or what?’

She follows him up. The building never seems to change, and the flat, too, is much as she always remembers it; underlit, smelling of mice, bare as if untenanted.

He sits by her while she cooks. From somewhere – Jem or the dole office – he has a crossword over which to grumble. ‘Neville was the one with a head for these things.’

‘No one making you do it. No one making you do anything,’ she says, sterner than she feels. At least he’s sitting, and without drinking. On the worst days he lets her in, goes back to bed and waits until she’s gone.

She fries potatoes, lights the oven. ‘You get that from Jem?’

‘He came by some time.’

‘He still with that girl?’

Clarence bends over the crossword, meek and gigantic. ‘No one asking you to like her,’ he says, and Sybil laughs, bitter and easy.

‘They wasting time if they trying. Do you?’

He hides in the puzzle again. ‘
Do
you?’ she persists, and he sighs.

‘The way I remember she was a good child. Not like her old man. Never cold. Besides, Jem don’t bring her here. It isn’t any of our business.’

She turns potatoes, cracks eggs, shirrs them.
Whose business, if it isn’t ours?
she thinks, but she keeps her mouth shut. She has said enough and heard enough of Florence Lockhart: talking will only spur her anger.

‘How’s that work? They treating you right?’ Dad asks, and Sybil relents.

‘This man came in today looking for the holiday of a lifetime. Wants to know all about Jamaica.’

‘Better lifetime here,’ Dad says, refractory and loyal always to the mother country, and fetches salt as Sybil brings the food to table.

After they’re done she washes and dusts. There’s one bottle in the cupboard and she leaves it where it is. It will do no good to take it. ‘Maybe something on the wireless,’ he calls, and she puts it on. The cricket has been rained off but they’re talking it over anyway. Clarence sits in the lounge, half listening, half watching her. The lino is worn patternless in a patch around his feet.

‘You look like her just then,’ he says.

‘Sweeping up after you?’ she asks, but he smiles, shakes his head.

‘Talking about that girl.’

‘You look like an old man,’ she says, straightening, ‘And you ain’t. How old are you?’

‘If you don’t know I don’t.’

‘You’re not old,’ she says, and goes to him, kisses him.

*

Sydney
. It’s one of those names that no one calls kids anymore. Sydney has gone bad with time. It smells of old men, of rooms where someone in the corner goes on about the war like a vicar with a dog-eared sermon. It’s an old name, and old means poor. Sydney is someone born into another time, a place of jam tomorrow and tomorrow never coming.

He doesn’t come back for two days. Trudi wonders if they’ve seen the last of him, but Sybil has no doubt. She thinks, He’s summoning his courage. It’ll be easier next time. He was afraid before, scared of sitting down and saying something to my face, but now he’s done it once and that’s why he’ll be back, because the worst is over with.

She thinks, It’s me that he’s afraid of. There’s no sense in that. It’s me he fears and wants to see, and why? Why do I matter to a stranger? You should run a mile, girl, you shouldn’t mean a thing to him. You shouldn’t talk to him again, she thinks; but she knows she will.

She wants the measure of him. It vexes her to have no answers. She isn’t scared of him. Sybil prides herself on fearlessness, and he isn’t some dirty old man – whatever Trudi says – or not just that. There’s always sex, but it’s more than that with him. It was more like family, the way she found herself talking. For all his awkwardness she found herself at ease with him. And she’d never tell Trudi, but she might even fancy him, enough at least not to kick him out of bed, if it ever came to that. He’s alright looking, though she has Tony to remind her that looks aren’t everything.

It’s Thursday noon and busy. Sybil is making calls when Phyllis stops beside her. Phyllis is the office gossip, a sponger of pleasure and grief. ‘Don’t look now, dear,’ she murmurs, and lingers as Sybil does.

Sydney is in the queue. It’s almost funny, watching him. He’s at the front, but each time a salesgirl comes free he stands aside, letting another in before him. He peers Sybil’s way in cornered exasperation.

‘Would you like me –’ Phyllis begins, but Sybil cuts her off, fobs off the voice on the phone, and is hanging up as Sydney seats himself.

‘Hello,’ she smiles. ‘I was wondering when I’d see you again.’

‘I was thinking,’ he says, and she thinks, No you weren’t, Sydney. You did all your thinking before. It was nerve you needed and you must have found it somewhere, because here you are.

‘So?’

‘I’d like to do it. What you said.’

‘The trip of a lifetime, you mean.’

‘No. Well, yes. I mean Jamaica.’

They sit looking at one another. She hasn’t been speaking the way you should with customers. Her voice and look are franker, more clandestine, more cautious. Why cautious? Because whatever’s happening here matters, she thinks, and I still don’t understand why.

‘Sydney,’ she says, ‘if all you want is flying, you don’t have to go far. It costs, you see what I’m saying?’

‘Oh, I have money,’ he says, and reaching into his coat he brings out a brown envelope, fattened, misshapen. He sets it on the desk carefully, as if its freight is new to him. ‘I’ve been saving,’ he says.

‘Put that away,’ she says, and he does while she gets out the forms, the necessary triplicate. She feeds the typewriter. ‘Montego Bay or Kingston?’

‘I don’t mind,’ he says. ‘You decide.’

‘Montego, then. You’ll want somewhere to stay, as well.’

‘I hadn’t thought,’ he says, and she laughs.

‘You planning to sleep on the beach? And you need to give me dates.’

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘You might choose.’

‘Sydney, I can’t do it all for you,’ Sybil says. ‘You got to decide these things for yourself.’