Injury Time

CONTENTS

About the Author

Beryl Bainbridge
is the author of seventeen novels, two travel books and five plays for stage and television. The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, An Awfully Big Adventure, Every Man for Himself and Master Georgie (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Every Man for Himself was awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. She won the Guardian Fiction Prize with The Dressmaker and the Whitbread Prize with Injury Time. The Bottle Factory Outing, Sweet William and The Dressmaker have been adapted for film, as was An Awfully Big Adventure, which starred Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Beryl Bainbridge died in July 2010.

F
ICTION

According to Queeney

An Awfully Big Adventure

Another Part of the Wood

The Birthday Boys

The Bottle Factory Outing

Collected Stories

The Dressmaker

Every Man for Himself

Filthy Lucre

Harriet Said

Master Georgie

Mum and Mr Armitage

Northern Stories (ed. with David Pownall)

A Quiet Life

Sweet William

Watson’s Apology

A Weekend with Claude

Winter Garden

Young Adolf

N
ON
-
FICTION

English Journey, or the Road to Milton Keynes

Forever England: North and South

Something Happened Yesterday

Published by Hachette Digital 2010

First published in Great Britain by Duckworth in 1977

Published by Penguin Books in 1991

Copyright © Beryl Bainbridge 1997

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eBook ISBN 978 0 74812 528 9

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D
uring the partners’ lunch, old Gifford talked indistinctly about the Rawlinson account: something to do with the new man on the board not having a first-class brain – he didn’t come up to scratch. From time to time Gifford’s shoulder dipped below the level of the tablecloth; he seemed to have dropped something. Hatters, from the Overseas department, told a story involving a doctor and a woman patient who heard pop music whenever her husband made love to her. Edward Freeman, who was seated opposite, missed the punch line. The fellow appeared to be muttering, or perhaps his own hearing was at fault. Alarmed by this new defect – lately he had been forced to wear spectacles when attempting the crossword – he stuck his finger in his ear and waggled it vigorously back and forth. Hatters, flourishing his fork in the air, was saying quite clearly that the engine of his car needed tuning. Edward allowed Mrs Chalmers to serve him with a second helping of lamb; he wasn’t hungry but he contributed twenty pounds a month toward the cost of the office lunches and was damned if he was letting a penny of it go to waste. Binny said it was killing him, all that meat stewed in wine and all those puddings consumed every day of the week. ‘Men of your age’, she constantly warned him, ‘are at risk. You’ll have a heart attack.’ At this moment, with less than six hours to go before the dinner party, he felt that a small coronary might do him the world of good. He didn’t think Binny would visit him in hospital – she wasn’t malicious. He could just lie there for several days, undergoing tests, doing a spot of reading, trying to sort himself out.

Even so, when lunch was over he took the lift to his office and denied himself the exertion of climbing three flights of stairs. The telephone rang as he came through the door. It was his wife Helen.

‘Are you going to be very late tonight?’ she asked. ‘Or just late?’

‘Oh, I shan’t be late,’ he said. ‘I mean, I’ll try to get away early.’

‘You usually try,’ she said.

There was a slight pause. Edward looked at the photograph of her, framed in leather, on the windowsill. She was holding a baby. On his desk was a snapshot of the same baby, several years older, crouched in a blurred garden cradling a rabbit in his arms.

‘You see,’ she said, ‘if I leave my meeting early and you don’t get back for hours, it’s a bit of a waste of effort . . . on my part. Do you see what I mean?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I shouldn’t think old Simpson will want to hang on too long. Not with his leg.’

‘That’s true enough.’

‘Look here,’ he said desperately. ‘Better be on the safe side. One can never tell with old Simpson. I suppose I could be late . . . I don’t want to spoil your meeting. I don’t want you to scamper away only to find I’ve got caught up.’

‘All right then, dear,’ she said. ‘I won’t.’

When she’d rung off he felt aggrieved. He wasn’t always late, not every night. Tuesday for instance he never visited Binny, and hardly ever on a Thursday. That was the night her youngest daughter went to Brownies and was inclined to be boisterous afterwards. And what about those numerous occasions when he’d made a special effort to get home early, left his evening post unsigned, faced the frightful rush-hour traffic and arrived in time to catch Helen backing down the path in the Mini, gadding off to yet another meeting? She wasn’t the only one who could imply there was cause for complaint, not by any means.

The telephone rang again. He knew at once it was Binny, because when he said Hello there was no reply, merely a sort of offended breathing. There had evidently been some deficiency of feeling in his voice when he first greeted her, a degree of casualness that she hadn’t liked. ‘Hello, Hello,’ he persisted. He kept his eyes fixed on the snapshot of the rabbit struggling in his son’s arms. He couldn’t remember what they’d called the animal . . . Tiger? . . . Twinkle? The beastly thing had turned the garden into a waste land before dying of old age and being shovelled under the damson tree.

‘Look here,’ he lied. ‘I’m frightfully busy. May I ring you back?’

‘Don’t bother,’ said Binny, and put down the receiver.

He dialled her number immediately. She made him wait at least half a minute before answering. ‘Look, don’t be angry,’ he pleaded. ‘I had somebody in my room.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘You don’t seem to realise I’m a very busy man. I had poor old Woodford with me.’

‘What’s poor about him?’

‘They’re leaving him with nothing,’ Edward said. ‘The Inland Revenue are bleeding him white.’

‘What do you call nothing?’ demanded Binny.

He knew he shouldn’t get involved in this sort of discussion – he always came off the worse for wear and was apt to be indiscreet about clients’ accounts. ‘They’re taking eighty-three pence in the pound,’ he confided, voice thin with outrage.

‘If they take that much,’ said Binny, ‘he must be rolling. It still leaves him with seventeen p and if he’s paying super-tax I bet the seventeen ps jolly well add up. You can hardly expect me to pass round the hat.’

They dwelt on old Woodford’s tax problems, loudly, for quite some time. Edward found her tone of voice offensive. After all, he’d taken a considerable risk in agreeing to invite Simpson and his wife to dinner at Binny’s house. He hadn’t so much agreed as been goaded into the arrangement. Binny had intimated in her forthright way that she was sick to death of being introduced only to those boozy male acquaintances of his who thought he was a hell of a dog for getting his leg over. She wanted to meet his real friends, preferably a married couple. ‘I’m not going to be hidden in the shadows of the saloon bar any longer,’ she’d said. She was perfectly within her rights of course. It was rotten for her, reeling out of the dentist alone, unable to depend upon him at Christmas, forced to see him at times mostly convenient to Helen. He gave her so little; he denied her the simple pleasures a wife took for granted – that business of cooking his meals, remembering his sister’s birthday, putting intricate little bundles of socks into his drawer. All he had to offer were those pitifully few hours of an evening, if and when Helen chose to go to one of her meetings.

And life, as Binny so often observed, was perilously short. She’d remarked upon it the first time they met, at a wine and cheese party given by clients of his – a firm of estate agents in Chalk Farm. He was early and knew no one save the senior partner, and was smarting because Helen had refused to accompany him; she preferred instead to attend an Inter Action group in Hampstead where she sometimes knelt on the floor and stroked people seated on either side. It was his impression afterwards that, when he entered the estate agents’ office, he’d noticed a pale and diminutive woman standing by the window. She wore a bunch of artificial flowers pinned to the collar of her dress and it was these same limp violets that enabled him later, much later, when she’d manoeuvred him behind a filing cabinet, to identify Binny. During the evening she had unaccountably gained weight and colour from somewhere. Her eyes shone brilliantly. She kept asking him if he was happy. It was then, just as he began to feel undeniably cheerful – he heard his own laughter loud above the murmur of voices – that she spoke of death, likening middle age to the second half of a football match. The game, she said, long since decided, was drawing to a close. Short of breath and flecked with mud, trembling in every limb, the players struggled up and down the pitch, waiting for the final whistle to blow. ‘Although I am still active in mid field,’ she told him, ‘it may be that I won’t play to the end. It’s possible that I shall be sent off.’ ‘Ah no,’ he cried, filled with a tenderness that was surely out of place after so short an acquaintanceship. ‘Not you.’ But Binny hadn’t heard him. She said she herself had enjoyed a life packed full of incident. She wondered if others could say the same. He was aware that as she talked the tips of her fingers brushed his own. She had travelled extensively in Europe, been divorced, known many lovers. Suddenly depressed, he longed to go home and watch television. He tried to catch the attention of the senior partner, and failed. Binny swayed a little on her feet and leant against him; the violets rustled on her breast. He escorted her to a terraced house in Fulton Street and fell over a bicycle in the hall. Shaken by her acceptance of death, he confessed that the passage of time affected him in a retrospective sort of way. He didn’t fear the deterioration that old age might bring – increased blood pressure, varicose veins, palpitations of the heart. It was waking in the night, as he did frequently, from dreams clear in every detail, of gardens glimpsed from windows, roads travelled, rooms dwelt in as a boy, that caused him agitation. He regretted that he no longer experienced the present or looked forward to the future. Unusually articulate and rubbing his shin bone, bruised from contact with the mudguard in the hall, he would have confided more but felt he was becoming boring. She made him a cup of coffee and enlisted his help with her tax problems, crying out in the middle of his discourse upon capital growth and percentages that she needed to embrace him. Remembering her formidable list of lovers, he was concerned she might be riddled with disease. He evaded her outstretched arms and circled the living room. As he walked, his life flew with him – the edge of a sports-field one day in summer, his father’s hand scuttling into a leather glove, the glimmer of a prefect’s badge lying in an oblong of sunlight on a desk – at last, desperate to blot out the shrill blast of that final whistle, he knelt at Binny’s feet and crawled with her on to the dusty sofa.