A Five Year Sentence (17 page)

The taxi drove up The Petunias carriageway, and set them down at the annexe door. A nurse greeted them, and showed the way to Mrs Watts' room. Brian put the case on the bed, and before he could open it, Miss Winters appeared in the doorway. She was a stern-looking woman, and though her voice was a smiling one, there was an uncanny lack of smile on her face. The wrinkles, now honoured by time, had probably been there from birth, notched initially by a lack of loving, and grooved over the years in the resulting acrimony. He would be delighted to leave them together.

As Brian took his mother's clothes out of the case, he noticed how Miss Winters was making her way towards the bed, eyeing each item of clothing as if gauging Mrs Watts' estate. Out of his
immoral earnings, he had bought his mother new sets of underwear, and a couple of floral frocks. When packing, he had interlaced each item with the coloured tissue paper that he used to trace his bills of fare. The case looked like a honeymooner's. Miss Winters looked on with approval.

They heard a bell from across the lawns. ‘That'll be lunch.' Miss Winters said. ‘Tuesday it's liver.' Her voice betrayed a certain relish for the dish, yet her face retained its air of stern disgust.

The nurse appeared at the door, and invited Brian to stay for lunch. It was a courtesy invitation and offered to all those accompanying the new inmates on their first day. He had a client at four o'clock, so there was time enough to dally. He accepted her offer and the nurse hurried away to inform the dining-room.

‘Would you like to see my room?' Miss Winters said. ‘It's just next door.' Mrs Watts was curious, and she tugged at Brian's sleeve. They followed Miss Winters into her retreat. The room was identical with his mother's but as Brian stepped inside, he had the impression that Miss Winters did not live alone, and looking around, it was clear that the lady lived with Jesus who was all over the walls and on every available surface. From behind the bed, He proclaimed that He was Love, on the bedside table, He bled in plastic gore from His crucifix. On the mantelpiece, He lay in His manger, flanked by papiermâché hay and cows. On the television cabinet, as if to offset the questionable goings on beneath Him, He posed as teacher, His hand outstretched towards the viewing sinner. The central piece was a ceramic model of the Holy Mother, covered in a polythene bag. She only took it off at Christmas, Miss Winters told them, but she would make an exception now in order to show that the figure was not just a pretty face. By a simple twist of the arm, the Lady let forth a musical box version of Silent Night, Holy Night. Miss Winters waited for the song to end, then she replaced the polythene bag. The room was a corner of Disneyland, and Mrs Watts thought it was very pretty. She looked round the room for the relief of a secular image. On the dressing-table, there was a large photograph of many people. It looked like a
school outing. A stern young woman stood at their centre, and the children flanked her in a startled paralysis of fear.

‘Those were my little orphans,' Miss Winters said with pride. ‘The Sacred Heart Orphanage. I was matron there.' Her voice was suddenly gruff, and Brian noticed a sudden smile on her face, and he marvelled at how the two measures managed to operate so separately. Mrs Watts was impressed. The Jesus paraphernalia belonged to her calling, so it was understandable. ‘I had forty girls and boys in my care,' she said, ‘and they all grew up into God-fearing Christians. I was there for thirty years.' The smile fell off her face and into her voice again, as she said, ‘After lunch, I'll tell you all about them.'

The dining-room was like that of an hotel. There were separate tables, and to each one, a vase of dusted petunias, hardy plastic perennials. The three of them were ushered by a uniformed waitress to a corner table overlooking the lawns, which was to be his mother's permanent and shared site. There were linen table napkins and an abundance of silver cutlery and the poshness of it all made Mrs Watts giggle. Brian feared for the inevitable puddle at her feet. Somehow, back in their old and dirty house, it didn't matter; the cracked lino on their living-room floor had acquired a natural expectation for her incontinence. But now, on this thickly carpeted floor, in the midst of all this continent decorum, he would have felt deeply ashamed, and as her escort, marginally responsible. He looked at the carpet beneath her feet. It was mercifully dry. He looked about the room. There were about forty guests in the dining-room and most of them were women. For a moment he considered it as a client hunting-ground, but he quickly dismissed the idea for it would have been poaching on his own doorstep, and in any case, they were all too old for any service beyond his first nursery category. In his first year of business, he might have been grateful for their small donations, but now, with his expansion, he need no longer entertain the small fry. And once again he gave a fearful thought to Miss Hawkins, and the brown Windsor soup dribbled on his chin. If she brought the subject up on the following day, he would lie. He would tell her her
money was safely invested. He thought he might work a little harder in order to re-pay her eventually and so be shot of her for ever. But he had to admit that he was physically incapable of taking on any more clients unless they needed only the first section, and that was boring work, and by the time he had deducted cost of travel, it was barely profitable. A thousand pounds meant years of hand and leg-touching, and by now he was too hardened a professional for that kind of trivia. He needed to get his mind off Miss Hawkins, and though he was totally disinterested in Miss Winters' past, he urged her to tell them as she had promised.

Miss Winters was very forthcoming. ‘They were the happiest days of my life,' she said, her miserable face denying every syllable. Indeed even Miss Winters occasionally confessed to herself, surrounded as she was by all the trappings of contrition, that as matron she had never been more miserable, but her subsequent retirement had been even more desolate, so her matron happiness was purely retrospective. ‘I must confess,' she said, ‘I preferred the little girls. They were so helpful about the house.' Had she been honest, as she was on occasion, lying stiffly between the sheets beside Him who had died for the likes of her, she would have admitted that she did not prefer the girls to the boys. She simply loathed them less. But over the intervening years, she had talked herself into the image of the loving and kindly mother substitute, and most of the time she believed in her illusion. ‘I was an orphan myself you see, so I knew their problems. But they were luckier than I ever was. I was brought up in a work-house. I'm not ashamed of it,' she almost shouted, ‘because I worked hard and I made something of myself.'

Brian thought she was quite loathsome and a fit companion for his mother. ‘Of course you did. Anyone can see that,' Mrs Watts said and as she was speaking, she was wondering about her return service and how she could justify herself to this stern daughter of duty. ‘I think you could say the same for me, couldn't you, Brian?' With her cold eyes she dared him to deny it, and he, fearing the puddle, hastily agreed. ‘I was brought up in an orphanage too,' she lied. Or did she lie? Brian wondered,
and he suddenly realised that his mother had never talked to him about her childhood. Her invective was confined to the years of her marriage, and the burden that Brian had been on her. Somehow he couldn't imagine his mother as a child, orphaned or otherwise, and he listened eagerly to the recital of her real or imagined childhood. When she mentioned the almshouse, Brian was suspicious, sensing that she was playing one-upmanship with Miss Winters, vying with her for the monopoly of deprivation in their formative years. But she gave its address, somewhere in the north of England, and she reeled it off with honest confidence. She'd left school when she was fourteen, she said, and like all the other girls, had gone into service. A variety of jobs followed, but she never rose above the rank of scullery maid. Miss Winters turned up her nose, not so much at the status itself, but that it betrayed a singular lack of initiative and efficiency on Mrs Watts' behalf. Mrs Watts caught her grimace, and pleaded that it was not her fault, that there was too much competition and that the head housekeepers were always against her. Miss Winters stiffened, as she had stiffened so many times in her matron days when faced with laziness and insubordination. Poor Mrs Watts knew that she had made a bad start, and she hastened to move on to the recital of her disastrous marriage, a subject which Miss Winters found much more to her taste and with her smiling voice and rigid face she offered her profound sympathy. ‘Then I had him,' Mrs Watts said without looking in Brian's direction, ‘and that more or less finished me off.'

For someone who'd been finished off, she looked pretty hale and hearty, but his mother was still insisting on her hardships and deprivation until even Miss Winters sought to change the subject, preferably back to herself.

‘I always saw that my girls understood marriage, and all the business that goes with it,' she said quickly. ‘Before they left the orphanage, I never ceased to remind them of the dangers that lay outside, and I gave them lots of tips to avoid them.' Brian wondered if those tips had been based on personal experience, but looking at Miss Winters, it was difficult to imagine that her knowledge was based on anything but prejudiced theory. She
was not exactly a repulsive woman, but there was something actively repellent about her. It was nothing definable like bad odour or ugliness. Miss Winters was over-clean and passing fair for her age. But she gave off a sour air of untouchability and a hint of dire consequences for anyone who so much as tapped her armour. But Brian was not tempted. He was happy to leave the two of them locked in their own life-enhancing bitterness.

After lunch, he took his mother back to her room and Miss Winters followed. She had a deep sense of her own privacy but it did not extend to others. She hovered at Mrs Watts' door as Brian took his leave. ‘I'll come and visit you,' he said. ‘One day next week.'

‘Only if you want to,' she said.

He didn't, any more than she wanted to see him. She saw herself settled for life in this luxury, and she was glad of it and she wanted no reminders of her pre-Petunia days.

‘I'll come next week,' he said. He didn't quite know how to say goodbye. Miss Winter's alarming presence on the threshold required, as audience, a formal farewell. He wasn't going to kiss his mother, and certainly he would not touch her snake-like hand. So he went behind her and pecked at her dowager's hump, noticing it for the first time. He backed towards the door. His mother wasn't even looking at him. She was busy putting a coloured glass paperweight on the mantelpiece. He sidled past Miss Winters forebearing to touch her too, and he was out of the drive and hailing a cab, before they noticed that he had gone.

When he reached home, he saw his mother's visiting card on the cracked lino. It would be the last one she would ever leave in this place, and this thought gave him heart as he took the mop and cleaned it away. Then he put the evil-smelling mop in the dustbin, together with her mattress. He spent the next hour cleaning the flat of all her remaining possessions. As he swept under the bed, he noticed that she had forgotten her slippers, and he was about to send them to the dustbin too, but he had an abrupt and acute feeling that he was burying her alive. And all of a sudden, he missed her. He sat on the springs of the bed and tried to accommodate the feelings that were so alien to him. He
told himself that she was better off where she was. He patted himself on the back that he had made it possible. She would eat well and be cared for, and she already had one friend which was one more than she'd ever had before. And hadn't he kept her all these years on his moral as well as immoral earnings? But with all these rationalisations, he still felt an uncommon ache in his heart. Had he investigated further, he would have realised that the ache had less to do with his mother than with poor Miss Hawkins whose cheese-paring slippers looked exactly the same. But no matter the cause, he wept, and his tears were on behalf of all the indecencies he'd ever committed, and all the love to which he'd never been able to surrender. For the first time in his life, Brian Watts acknowledged that, after all, he was only human.

Miss Hawkins rose full of resolute decisions. She had promised Maurice that she would talk to Brian and she dare not let Maurice down. As far as she was concerned, she was happy to let matters slide, and to trust that Brian had invested her money wisely. But Maurice was worried on her behalf and it was only right that she should set his mind at rest.

As she crossed through the hall into the kitchen, she saw a letter in the box. There was no account due, and she wondered who on earth could be writing to her. She had a presentiment of bad news, and picked up the letter and did not look at it until she'd reached the support of the sitting-room settee. On the back of the envelope was printed the name of her bank, and her stomach rumbled with fear. She opened it quickly, seeing no point in delaying the bad news. The letter was from her bank manager. He had noted, with some concern, she read, the dwindling deposit of her savings, and he would be glad if she would come to the bank at her earliest convenience to discuss the matter with him. He added a P.S. to the letter wishing her a Happy New Year, but it was clearly an afterthought, and as such, held out little hope for her future prosperity. A surge of Brian-hate welled inside her, but she controlled it, knowing that the letter came as no surprise. She knew that she had been drawing on her savings, but what worried her was the bank manager's concern, which strongly reflected her own, and confirmed that she did indeed have something to be anxious about. She tried to cheer herself up with a cup of tea, and to convince herself that Brian had surely invested her savings. She decided to dress and go straightaway to the bank so that she would be armed to face Brian in the afternoon. Whatever the outcome at the bank the
confrontation was imperative, so she opened her diary and wrote, ‘Tackled Brian. (About my investment.)'