What Was Promised (42 page)

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Why? Why should you even try?’ she asks, and his smile ebbs.

‘Why shouldn’t I? You asked me to.’

‘I know,’ she says, ‘I’m grateful. Michael, before, in the Buildings, I was nothing to you. You never looked at me. You were never kind. No kinder than you had to be, not to strangers.’

‘Is that what you want of me, unkindness? Because you expect it of me?’

‘No,’ she says, ‘of course not. I just need –’

‘I don’t know,’ he says, under his breath. He has drawn in, hands gathered into pockets, head bowed, and a weariness has crept into his voice that draws all definition from his words.

‘What does that mean? You don’t know what I want of you? You don’t know why you’re doing this?’

‘Don’t raise your voice to me,’ he says, and Dora understands then that she should be frightened, that she is frightened, in fact; and that she doesn’t care. I am alone with him, she thinks. I meant to be alone with him, and there is no helping me now.

‘It doesn’t make it better.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It doesn’t make you right. I can’t forgive you for Bernadette.’

‘Who are you saying?’ he whispers, and the anger in his eyes is rising, inflammatory; and then she is kissing him.

As if he means to shove her away his hands go to her shoulders. Then he is kissing her back, his fingers climbing to her hair, into it, fiercely cupping her skull. She is moaning into his mouth. One foot jounces on the boards as her legs begin to go. Michael is hoisting up her dress.

‘Little skipjack,’ Fred Isaacs says, patting at his wife’s belly. ‘Little bumpkin, are you dancing for us, in there?’

‘Gently,’ Sarah admonishes, and then, ‘Congratulations, Dora, Solomon. You must have friends in high places.’

‘We don’t,’ Dora says, ‘just Mr Barnard.’

‘To Barnard,’ Solly says, cheery as a Buddha, refilling glasses. ‘No, scratch that – why should he get all the credit? To my wife, my pertinacious, perspicacious, pretty wife, who needs another top-up. I don’t see who else I should be thanking.’

They’re in the Isaacses’ room, the men both half-cut, and Dora tipsy, too, in the hope that it might soothe her nerves. ‘We shouldn’t celebrate,’ she says, ‘not until we have something in writing,’ but Solly isn’t having that.

‘You deserve a medal, that’s what . . . and look here, all we’ve got is sherry. You should see the shop, though, Fred, you’ll want Sarah out there, too, doing the business.’

Only Sarah is sober, and quieter than the rest. She is an attentive woman. Dora can’t hate her for it, it’s the way she is, but Sarah is the one who sees when she comes and goes, sees what little she has to show for the hours she spends away; who hears – if anyone does – when Dora fills the basin and washes her parts, crouched alone in the mole’s-eye room. Sarah’s gaze is gentle, but Dora shivers when it lingers.

Her hours are spent in joy. They meet in the gardens by St Paul’s, where no one who knows them would have any business being, and walk apart, like strangers, to the car. Michael is the man with the keys to the city, to unlet Soho attic flats and disinhabited Southwark railway terraces, though once, in Woolwich, the place he brings them to has been taken up by squatters, and he leads her off without a word, the muscles ticking in his cheeks, and drives until they find waste ground, and fucks her there in the noon-hot shadows of a derelict. It is summer, and the smell of the place fills her as her pleasure overtakes her. The sweetness of the estuaries, the candied semen of balsam, and the rankness of old elderflower, soiled, unharvested.

How does she dare? She has never been brave, but she is proud, and she is owed joy. Isn’t everyone?

In July they move to Old Street. It’s Barnard who deals with them, who gives them the tour and the salesman’s spiel, as if the flat were fancy or they in any need of convincing. Michael’s name is never mentioned. As Solly signs the contract Barnard’s eyes meet Dora’s, and she understands that his discretion is exercised according to instructions.

Mrs Walkling, their new neighbour, is a widow with no time for women. She is capricious with Dora, full of malign misinformation, but takes a shine to Solly and bakes him Eccles cakes: the first has two hairs in it, one ginger, one tawny, neither Mrs Walkling’s. She has nine cats, all mollies. ‘They don’t vie with me,’ she says, as she scoops them from their stairwell lairs. ‘They don’t talk back. My girls know better,’ Mrs Walkling says.

One evening she looks up and Solly is watching her. She is darning their old curtains, and – she knows it only now – has been singing as she works. ‘What?’ she asks, and he shrugs.

‘You’re on top of the world.’

‘Just happy,’ she says, ‘I must be happy. Can’t you hear me singing?’

He smiles for her, but the dimple of his frown remains. ‘I can stop,’ she says, ‘if it bothers you.’

‘No,’ he says, ‘why should it? I’m happy when you’re happy.’

Another night he falls asleep over his reading. Dora goes to close the book. It’s something from the library: history is Solly’s thing, or essays – Orwell if there’s nothing better – but this is poetry, she sees, and she turns the page and reads.

I am in love

And that is my shame.

What hurts my soul

My soul adores,

No better than a beast

Upon all fours
.

Old Street makes things no simpler. The cats follow Dora around, in and out and up and down, like inscrutable informants, and their mistress loiters on the stairs, leaves her door ajar, and barters her half-imagined rumours with the railwaymen’s wives downstairs. The walls might as well have ears. And then the shop is close, so near that Solly can be home when Dora least expects him, looking for a kiss or company, a working for a watch, mustard for a sandwich.

On the City Road, by Moorgate, there are four telephones, the boxes all lined up like soldiers. On Friday afternoons – that being when Solly works late, hoping for the weekend crowds – Dora dials, pays, gives a name that is not hers, and waits to be put through. ‘How are you?’ she asks, and if Michael says, ‘very well,’ or ‘never better,’ her chest tightens, because it means he’ll come; but if he says, ‘Busy today,’ she hangs up and walks homewards with her lying heart in tatters.

Christmas, he buys her pearls.
Learn from my weaknesses
, her father told her once, in Danzig, near the end;
Don’t put your faith in things
. But her father is long gone, him and his treasured possessions, and it seems to Dora now that her lover’s gift is more than just an object. As she lifts the rope against herself its lustre takes her breath away; then, ‘Michael!’ she exclaims, and he laughs and settles back to watch her.

She wears them only that winter, with him. For years, afterwards, she takes them from their hiding place, wherever it is she lives, whenever she is missing Michael and sure to be alone. Not to put them on again – because there is no one to share them – but to recall that Michael once gave her such things. They are dark, the pearls, and their hues alter, ashen in one light, burnt umber in another; and Dora, when she looks at them, sees what she suspects Michael did not, at least in any way he might have admitted to himself: that their colours recollect those of Bernadette Malcolm.

It is sex with them, or argument. There is no middle ground, nor are the two things so far apart. Each is heartfelt, gut-felt. Fighting with Michael is nothing like arguing with Solly. They never quibble, she and Michael; they never bicker.

‘You don’t make love to me.’

‘What do I do, then?’ And when she turns her head away, ‘If you can do it, you can say it.’

‘What would you do with her?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he says, but he does, he knows all too well that she means Bernadette. That she means, Do you care for me because you never cared for her?

‘You can tell me.
Tell me
. What would you do?’

He laughs. It is a cruel laugh, but the pitilessness is all for himself. He sits up, lights a cigarette. ‘You’re mad,’ he says. ‘You must be mad, to be jealous of the dead.’

In January he stops taking her calls. The first time it happens she understands that Mary must be with him, or someone else so proximate that he doesn’t trust himself to speak. He is busy with family, she knows – he has been moving himself, from Holloway to a bigger place on Highbury Fields – but the next Friday it’s the same, and the week after.

‘Mr Lockhart is in a meeting,’ the secretaries tell her, ‘perhaps you might call back tomorrow?’ They are prim and tart, or so it seems to Dora, as if they’ve come to their own conclusions.

On the first Saturday in February she goes with Solly to Columbia Road. The new estate is going up, and whatever their misgivings or allegiances there is a thrill to the scale of the ascension. They buy kippers at Lee’s and tobacco at Shaw’s, and a dozen freckled market eggs, because they look so pretty and they can afford them, now. It is crisp and bright, and Solly too is sunny, full of plans, prodding his pipe at the dreams that lie mid-air before them. They’re almost home when Dora sees Michael’s car, its muzzle jutting from the narrow shadows of Boot Street.

‘Oh, milk!’ she says, once they’re in, ‘Solly, we’ll need a pint for the kippers, I don’t want the stink of them frying. I’ll just run out for it,’ and she does run: flees, almost, before Solly can offer himself.

The car still lurks in Boot Street. Michael sees her coming, leans to get the door. Already her eyes are tearing. Before he can speak, before she can think to stop herself, Dora has slapped him.

There is silence in the blow’s wake. The slap is her question and she waits for his answer. He could hit her back, there are men that would. Part of her hopes he will, but she isn’t surprised when he doesn’t. He doesn’t have that in him, despite Bernadette or because of her: Dora knows him, now, and is sure of it.

He raises his hand to check his face. One side still bears her fingers’ imprints, with a deeper bloom where her rings have caught his cheekbone.

‘Are you done?’

‘No. Yes. Do you hate me?’

‘I wish I did, it would make things easier.’

‘You don’t want to see me again. That’s it, isn’t it? Why don’t you?’

‘Your husband knows.’

For a while she says nothing. She is lost for words: she gapes like the fish he keeps in their ornamented tank. She sags back, holds onto his gaze. Later she wonders if she faints: certainly, when she comes back to herself, she has lost the sense of what he has been telling her.

‘. . . Last week, too,’ he is saying. ‘You never looked my way. I wanted to tell you to your face. He came by the office three weeks back. Might have been out there all day waiting, he looked cold enough. He saw my face and I saw his. He knows, I saw it in his eyes, he made sure of it. You never mentioned me?’

‘No,’ she whispers, ‘no, of course not, never.’

‘Your man’s no fool, though. He twigged to something. He can put two and two together.’

‘But he never told me. Why wouldn’t he?’

‘That’s between you and him.’

‘Because he wants me,’ she says as it comes to her, ‘and he won’t let me have you.’ Michael broods on that, nods. ‘Don’t you?’ she asks, ‘want me?’

‘Dora –’

She raises her chin. ‘I don’t care. Let him know. Michael?’ she asks, but what she is asking she hardly knows, and besides, his expression has drawn in.

‘I won’t have Mary finding out.’

‘What if she does? What does it matter?’ She laughs. ‘Oh, Michael, don’t tell me I’d be the first.’

‘It would be hard on her,’ Michael says, ‘it being you. You’re part and parcel of the worst of it for her.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she says, and he scowls. He would rather speak of anything than this. ‘The Buildings, the Malcolms. The dead, Dora. Mary would take you badly. I won’t have that.’

‘But she won’t find out. We’ll be more careful, and Solly would never –’

‘Are you sure of that?’ Michael asks, and she knows he’s right. What does she know of Solly, who has gone on all these weeks as if nothing has changed between them?

‘Dora,’ he says then, as gently as he is able, ‘we were never built to last. We both knew it from the start.’

‘I didn’t. Don’t you tell me what I know.’

‘I’m telling you we’re done. I’m sorry. Look, I’ve fixed the other place for you, up at the estate. It won’t be much of a garden, community spaces are what they’re all about now. You’ll hear from them – Dora!’

She is out by then. She is running again and doesn’t stop till she’s home. She forgets the milk, of course, though it hardly matters. Solly doesn’t mention it. They have the kippers fried, the curtains reek of them for weeks, and nothing is said between them, not then, not once, not ever.

It ends then. It doesn’t end when she finds out where he lives. She doesn’t go to Highbury Fields, one chill March evening, to ask for the Lockhart house. She never waits under the plane trees, watching the lights of his windows for hours until she sees his form: nor does she edge closer, lurking on the green, until he comes out to her. What if she had? What would he have said? But she would have stopped him, she would have stopped him with a kiss, and when he told her no she would have bitten him, fastened onto him with her teeth. When he shoved her away she would have wiped the blood from her mouth, her eyes shining with the taste of him.