Part 10 (1/2)

'Mr Potter knows about paintings. He took me round the Walker Art Gallery. He likes the religious ones best.'

'He would,' said O'Hara.

She could tell there was something bothering him. He wasn't quite comfortable with her. He was looking at her intently, as if he expected she might do something surprising, like flying up the chimney.

Suddenly he kissed her. She opened her lips obediently and remained perfectly still. When he let her go she wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

He said, 'Perhaps I ought to take you home.' He sounded grumpy.

'I don't mind staying if it's all the same to you,' she said. It had to happen sometime and now was as good a time as any. She wanted to get it over with.

It was unusual, that was for sure. She felt a certain sad excitement, a little discomfort and much embarra.s.sment, the latter concerned with the removal of clothing. I am dying, Egypt, dying I am dying, Egypt, dying, her mind gabbled when Dotty Blundell's bra.s.siere fell to the dusty floor. She hadn't been prepared for the way poetry came into this fitting together of parts, Shall I believe that unsubstantial Death is amorous, and that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee here in dark to be his paramour Shall I believe that unsubstantial Death is amorous, and that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee here in dark to be his paramour, she recited in her head, as O'Hara climbed on top and humped her beneath the rude unshaded bulb. Not that O'Hara was either lean or a monster. 'Stella Maris,' he muttered against her hair, and jumped away like a fish leaping on a bank.

When it appeared to be over he'd stopped breathing so heavily and lay with his eyes closed she asked him who Stella Maris was.

'Did I say that?' he said, and sat up and combed his hair. 'I knew someone of that name a long time ago. It means Star of the Sea.'

'Stella Maris,' she repeated. 'It's nice.'

'It wasn't her real name,' he said. 'Just something she made up.'

She was staring somewhat scornfully at his plump shoulders. He put on his s.h.i.+rt and suggested she should wash herself at the sink. She refused; she'd had a bath the night before.

'You mustn't worry,' he said. 'I was very careful. I'm not an irresponsible man.'

She supposed he was thinking about babies. She wasn't bothered. If what she had done was a sin then it was only right she should be punished. 'No use crying over spilt milk,' she said. If she had weakened for a moment, to the extent of uttering one soft word of forgiveness, of friends.h.i.+p, she might have burst into tears. Already in the expression of her eyes, the beginnings of her small, triumphant smile, there was more than a touch of the martyr.

'Did you enjoy it?' he asked, not looking at her.

'Not really,' she admitted. 'I expect there's a knack to it. It's very intimate, isn't it?'

He insisted on walking her home but she ran off at the corner. He wasn't pleased with himself. Whatever momentary spasm of pleasure he had experienced was now forgotten. He was also more than a little scandalised at the girl's matter-of-fact acceptance of what had happened. She hadn't wept or clung to him, demanded to know what he felt about her, uttered those naive and sweetly foolish declarations of undying love expected of a young girl whose virginity had just been taken. He was fairly certain she had no idea of how gentle he had been, how thoughtful. One way and another he felt let down.

Stella didn't go home, not right away. Instead she walked as fast as she could towards the river, past the mean little houses below the cathedral. She almost choked on the stench of damp grain blowing up the hill.

There was a man in the telephone box outside the Mission Hall. She crouched in the shadows of the porch and watched the blurred lights of a Christmas tree winking in the first-floor room of a house opposite. A little girl carrying either a doll or a child walked back and forth behind the windows.

It was cold in the street. The chemical clouds curdled above the black top-hats of the chimney stacks. From the dock road came a steady rumble of traffic and the heartbeat of machinery as the sugar-refinery pumped in the fiery darkness. At last the man staggered out, a string of sausages slung about his neck.

She pressed b.u.t.ton A and heard Mother's voice; she felt shy. She had meant to confide that she, too, was a seduced woman; yet when it came to it she couldn't find the correct words. All the poetry had dribbled out of her. She wished Mother a Happy Christmas, her eyes fixed on the child across the road and that silhouette of Mr Punch who now appeared with raised and menacing fist.

Mother responded in the usual way.

11.

At the matinee on Boxing Day O'Hara, dragging a reluctant Nana by the collar, made his exit as Mr Darling and raced upstairs to transform himself into Captain Hook. On his return Geoffrey should have been waiting in the wings to a.s.sist him into his pirate coat the hook attached to the sleeve rendered it c.u.mbersome. He wasn't there. The child who played Tootles stood on a chair and helped him instead. It was a breach of discipline, Geoffrey being absent.

During the second interval Geoffrey apologised, giving the excuse that one of the battens of the hollow trees had worked itself loose and that at the last moment Bunny had required him to fix it more securely into its brace. But then at the evening performance he again went missing.

This time Stella was there to heave O'Hara into the coat. He said, 'Did you have a good Christmas?', and not looking at him she thanked him for asking and replied that it had been quiet but nice.

She was being polite. Uncle Vernon, goaded by the presence of the traveller with the skin grafts, had ruined the festive meal with recollections of his march across France and an encounter in a partially demolished farmhouse outside Lille with a white-haired woman of thirty who as a small child had suffered atrocities in the First World War. German officers second-line supply men searching for food and told there was none had wrenched her from her mother's arms and, dumping her in the was.h.i.+ng boiler on the kitchen stove, threatened to cook and eat her.

On hearing the story Lily had retired to bed with a headache leaving Stella to do the was.h.i.+ng-up. The traveller had dried the dishes. Tears ran down his cheeks, but that was because his eyes couldn't blink. Uncle Vernon, wearing a paper crown jerked from a cracker, had nodded off in his armchair listening to a choral ma.s.s on the Third Programme.

Stella was in the prompt corner wielding her torch when O'Hara made his second exit. He loitered in the wings, although usually he sat in his dressing-room until the curtain rose on the Mermaid's Lagoon. He noticed she was wearing a string of cheap pearls about her neck. On stage the First Twin had sighted the white bird and was declaiming, 'See it comes, the Wendy,' and Tootles, pointing at the gossamer light sailing across the painted trees, called out, 'Tink is trying to hurt the Wendy.' A child in the audience shouted a timid warning. Then Stella, responding to a signal from Bunny, swung her hand-bell.

'Someone's been splas.h.i.+ng out at Woolworths,' said O'Hara, tapping with his hook at the pearls. In the half-darkness his face with its rouged lips, its black cross stamped on the cheekbone, was ghastly.

'Quiet please,' hissed Bunny.

Frowning, O'Hara inched open the pa.s.s door and tiptoed into the prop-room. He was annoyed at being caught in the wrong.

George rolled him a cigarette. 'Word in your ear,' he said. 'Someone should keep a weather eye on young Geoffrey.'

'He's let me down twice today,' O'Hara said. 'What's up with him?'

'No disrespect intended, Captain,' said George. 'But you'd best work it out for yourself.'

After the curtain call O'Hara asked Stella if she wanted a lift home on his motor-cycle. 'If you like,' she said. She kept him waiting and when she finally emerged from the stage door he had been waylaid by Freddie Reynalde. She walked past without looking at them.

'What about a drink?' suggested Freddie.

O'Hara said he couldn't face Potter.

'We don't have to go to the Oyster Bar.'

'Another time, old chap. I'm bushed.'

'I can see that,' Freddie said, and they both watched the girl trudging towards the corner.

O'Hara caught up with Stella at the bottom of the hill. She told him to go on ahead, that she didn't want a ride.

'Why not?' he asked.

'I just don't,' she said. 'My uncle wouldn't like it.' He thought she meant she was going straight home and drove off with a sulky smile.

He was surprised when she rapped on the bas.e.m.e.nt window. Entering, she circled the room, her expression hostile. He lit the gas-fire and made her kneel in front of it to warm herself. 'I'm not stopping,' she said, teeth chattering. 'You ought to wrap up more,' he advised. 'Now that it's winter. You've a terrible cough.' She protested she'd rather freeze than wear the coat Lily had bought her. It was too big and it had a fur collar.

'It sounds rather glamorous,' he said.

'That's as maybe,' she retorted. 'It's too much trouble. You have to paint your face if you wear a fur. It draws attention.'

He found himself involved in an argument about silver wrapping-paper only serving to accentuate the paltriness of a gift. It was best, she said, to encase cheap goods in brown paper. Shaken, he imagined she was feeling guilty at having given herself so easily. He heard himself saying it was surely the thought that counted, and was astonished at the ba.n.a.l words that hurtled from his mouth. She crouched on the lino, her face flushed from the fire, fingering that string of Christmas cracker beads.

He asked who had given her them, and she said they were a present from her mother. He apologised for having suggested they were bought at Woolworths. She looked at him without blinking and said they probably had been. That was why her mother hadn't wrapped them up but had left them on her pillow twined around a single rose.