Injury Time (2 page)

He thought possibly it was the unsatisfactory briefness of his moments with Binny that explained his continuing desire to see her. God knows, she was rude enough to him, but then they spent so little time together that her insulting behaviour never had a chance to build up into anything sufficiently awful; she never actually hit him. She was too often interrupted by the children, who were either in and using the telephone, or out and telephoning in. They were always being flung out of pool-rooms or cafés, or held at railway stations for the non-payment of fares. Once the youngest child’s hamster started to die the moment Edward entered the house. Edward had been required to spoon brandy down the animal’s throat until it passed on. The sight of those delicate paws, tipped with pink, feebly scratching the air, reminded Edward of his own inner conflict. There were some doors that would never open. Binny was a wonderful mother, but she didn’t seem to realise he was a very busy man and his time was limited. They could never do anything until her ten-year-old had settled down for the night. They could usually start doing something at about five to eleven, and then they had to do it very quickly because Edward had to leave at quarter past eleven. He was always whispering frantically into Binny’s ear what he might do if only they had a whole evening together, and she grew quite pale and breathless and hugged him fearfully tightly in the hall, mostly when seeing him out. He loved her when she had difficulty in breathing. Just thinking about it made him feel disturbed.

Binny was telling him in a hectoring manner that she bet old Woodford, despite extreme poverty, had two cars and a mansion in the country.

He said bitterly, ‘I wish to God the Simpsons weren’t coming to dinner tonight. I wish we were on our own.’ In order to ensure a peaceful evening without undue excitement, for the first time in all the years he had known her the children were spending the night elsewhere.

‘I’m not calling it dinner,’ said Binny ominously.

‘Oh, aren’t you?’ he said.

‘No, I’m bloody well not.’

‘Well, what are you calling it?’ he asked uneasily.

Evidently she was worried about the food she was preparing. She had telephoned, most likely, to ask him if the menu she had decided upon was suitable, and that first insensitively expressed Hello of his had depressed her. He didn’t think she was a very good cook – not that she’d ever made him a meal – but he sensed that her attitude to food was rather casual. When he took her out to dinner quite normal things, like artichokes, annoyed her. She said they were a waste of time. He hadn’t actually spotted two plates in her kitchen with the same pattern round the rim. However, none of that counted at the moment. She could burn every morsel to be eaten and dispense entirely with knives and forks, if only the evening passed without repercussions. It was vital that nobody dropped in. He longed to ask Binny if she had taken precautions against such an event, but he knew her reply would be deliberately calculated to alarm. She would probably inform him she was hauling up the drawbridge any moment now but could he tell her anything about the little man on the corner in the mackintosh, the one with the binoculars and the camera. He hadn’t met Simpson’s wife before, but he was fairly certain there was no danger there. He gathered that Simpson’s wife had once studied Esperanto, and Simpson boasted that she regularly visited the local pub with a girlfriend. She was obviously pretty broadminded and not the sort to go round telling everyone he was carrying on with another woman. But what if a neighbour of Binny’s dropped in during the meal and turned out to be a friend of a mutual friend? Possibly a friend of the girl who went to the pub with Simpson’s wife. And what if they happened to know someone who went to the same Liberal party meetings as Helen or employed the same cleaning lady? It could get back. People were always remarking on the smallness of the world since the invention of the aeroplane.

Dreadfully agitated, Edward shuffled the papers on his desk and thought he experienced a sharp pain in his chest.

‘What’s up with you?’ asked Binny. ‘What did you make that noise for?’

He denied that he had made any noise out of the ordinary. There was silence for several seconds until Binny said he was to stop worrying about being caught out. He protested it was the last thing on his mind.

‘Liar,’ she cried exultantly. ‘You’re scared rigid someone will tell your wife. You didn’t have to come to dinner, you know.’

‘But I want to come to dinner—’

‘Nobody forced you. Nobody pulled your toenails out.’

He insisted he was looking forward to the evening ahead and Binny said like hell he was and she didn’t understand the way his mind worked; he was completely foreign to her, complaining on the one hand that until they met he had found his life dull, sordid—

‘Not sordid,’ he objected. ‘My life has never been sordid.’

‘Well, squalid, then. You were bothered about growing old.

‘Whereas now,’ he observed sharply, ‘I doubt if I’ll live that long.’

It seemed to put her in a better mood, his fear of untimely death. She laughed a lot and told him he was lovely and that if he was very good she wouldn’t argue with him for a whole week.

When he put the phone down his hands were trembling.

B
inny was disturbed in the middle of washing down the paintwork in the kitchen by the arrival of her friend Alma Waterhouse who had come in a taxi to borrow the hoover.

It was an awkward situation with the meter ticking over.

‘It won’t work,’ improvised Binny. ‘Someone’s taken the plug off the end.’

Alma went into the street to send the taxi man away. Binny dragged the hoover from under the stairs and threw it down the back steps into the yard. It wouldn’t do to let Alma know that she herself wanted to use the machine. It would arouse suspicion. Binny rarely hoovered. If she admitted that guests were coming for the evening, Alma would expect to be invited. She was having husband trouble and needed taking out of herself.

On the draining-board glittered four cooking apples, stuffed with raisins and wrapped in silver foil. Hastily bundling them into a carrier bag, Binny dropped them behind the fridge. Alma returned. She took from the pocket of her camel coat a quarter bottle of whisky and approached the cupboard where the glasses were kept.

‘I can’t allow it,’ said Binny. Defiantly she barred the way.

‘Whatever’s the matter?’ cried Alma, astonished at her attitude. ‘We could do with a little swiggie, darling. It’s awfully cold out.’ Alma was a great believer in swiggies, whatever the temperature.

Binny stood her ground and adopted a crucified position against the mahogany wall cupboard. She gazed seriously at Alma and after a pause added the words ‘Not now’, holding aloft a pink sponge with which she had rinsed the woodwork; lukewarm water trickled down her arm. Impressed, Alma stepped back and put away the bottle. Binny said she had shopping to do. She tied a scarf over her newly washed hair and pushed Alma out of the house, striding ahead along the alleyway toward the High Street. Behind the wire netting of the play centre, children crawled along concrete pipes, screaming.

‘Have I said anything out of turn?’ asked Alma, teetering over the cobblestones in her high-heeled boots.

Binny was feeling terribly emotional. She wished she hadn’t spoken so harshly to Edward on the telephone and regretted she’d been unkind about his friend, old Woodford. It wasn’t very nice, the government taking his money off him like that. She wouldn’t like it. It was the way Edward
hadn’t
said Hello that had put a damper on things. She’d been in perfectly good spirits when dialling his number. She’d scrubbed the bath, hung clean towels over the edge and done all that raisin business with the apples. Then quite suddenly, on hearing his clipped and well-bred voice, she had dropped into somewhere dark and confined – she was shut inside a box beneath a river. She felt he wouldn’t be able to hear her even if she shouted. This feeling of being locked away from him had something to do with visualising Edward, on the other end of the telephone, leaning against a desk polished by somebody he had never met, blotting the corners of his mouth to remove traces of a meal he hadn’t cooked, with a handkerchief that came fresh and laundered out of his breast pocket as if by magic. It was the privileged style in which the man lived that silenced her.

When she’d first seen him, stepping through the doorway of the outer office in Chalk Farm, he’d reminded her of various portly relatives glimpsed only in the pages of photograph albums. He wore galoshes and held, either in his hand or teeth, the stem of a small and blackened pipe. His face, which was pale and fair, had a curious swelling between the eyebrows as though he had been stung by an insect. Bitten by life, she thought, watching his mouth open and close behind a drift of tobacco smoke. The way he told it, there wasn’t much point to his existence. He had always done the right thing, supported his wife, educated his son, made sure the garden was tidy. There had been that trouble years ago – here he waved his hand rather vaguely in the air as if turning the handle of a gramophone – but he had learned to live with it. Binny pretended at first she was still married, to avoid complications. But later in the evening, rather charmed by those galoshes and the manner in which he constantly puffed, sucked and fooled over his pipe, she allowed him to see her home. He kept looking at himself in the mirror. She couldn’t be sure if the swelling upon his forehead made him appear hideous, or distinguished in a Roman sort of way. She couldn’t tell at all now because, loving him as she supposed she did, she no longer saw him as he was. That first night he had spoken confusedly of his time at boarding school. Captain of the cricket team . . . head of his dormitory . . . That rotter Jonas . . . If it hadn’t been for Muldoon – what a stinker
he’d
turned out to be. He was obviously re-living the heyday of his prep school years. There was something too about his father and a pair of gloves, and a beastly rumpus over a prefect’s badge. She could make little sense of it. Having attended grammar school and forgotten all about it, Binny was touched by his continued preoccupation with those far off boyhood days.

If she hadn’t been touched, she thought gloomily, she wouldn’t be out in this weather, catering for his friends.

On the pavement outside the British Rail warehouse, lying in disorder across the rusted springs of a double bed, sprawled several elderly men and women drinking out of a communal bottle. Binny retraced her steps and caught hold of Alma’s arm.

‘It’s everywhere,’ she whispered. ‘Where are the police?’

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ scolded Alma. ‘The last thing we need is a policeman.

Smiling and nodding ingratiatingly, she led Binny forward. An old woman in a fur coat and a pair of tennis shoes, reclining on one elbow as though in a punt on a lake, stared at Alma in admiration. ‘My goodness,’ she shouted. ‘You’re a bonny girl. Will you look at that hair on her head?’ Alma’s hair, rinsed to an unusual shade of strawberry blonde, was blowing in all directions.

Pleased, Alma stopped and confessed it wasn’t altogether natural. ‘I use a little something,’ she confided. ‘Hint of a Tint . . . every second or third wash.’

Bouncing in excitement on the dilapidated bed, unsettling her geriatric companions wrapped in sacking, the old woman laughed and leered her approval. Two men struggled upright into a sitting position and spat violently into the gutter. Their eyes, half averted, were those of animals existing in darkness. Binny ran away, and emerged breathlessly on to the High Street looking for someone in authority.

“You’re a bundle of nerves,’ decided Alma some moments later, coming across Binny leaning against the wall of a public house. ‘You should have had a little swiggie when I pressed you.’

‘I don’t know how you could talk to them,’ said Binny. ‘They looked dangerous.’

‘Silly girl. They were only enjoying themselves.’

‘She had iodine dabbed all over her face,’ said Binny.

‘Well, she had one or two cuts on her nose,’ defended Alma. ‘It’s natural. Old people are always falling over. Think of your own mother when she dislocated her hip.’

‘She stumbled getting out of a taxi,’ Binny said. ‘She wasn’t rolling about in the gutter with a bottle of meths.’

In silence they walked down the street. Alma slowed her steps expectantly at each shop doorway, but Binny hurried on. She had no money.

At last, made miserable by the chill wind and deafened by the roar of traffic, they fled inside the Wimpy bar for a cup of coffee. The waitress was affronted at the bold way they expected service. After five minutes of hostile inactivity she relented and left two cups of pale yellow liquid at the edge of the table.

‘I wouldn’t mind a doughnut,’ called Alma, but the waitress had better things to do.

From where she sat in the window, Binny could see both the perambulator braked at the steps of the bank and the clock above the door of the shoe shop. It was ten minutes to three. If the bank closed before she had time to cash her cheque, she wouldn’t be able to afford cream for the baked apples, or Greek bread, or buy enough salad to make a splash. She was tempting fate. She wanted the dinner party to go well for Edward’s sake, but she didn’t want to strive for success. All her life she had found that when she went to a great deal of trouble, the results were never satisfactory; her greatest triumphs had been accidental.

A man in a bowler hat, strolling backwards and forwards in front of the bank, took a rolled-up newspaper from under his arm, and pausing in his stride proceeded to tap the hood of the perambulator.

Alma was in the middle of a story concerning her son Victor, who only the day before had behaved badly in a car. ‘He told me to throw it away,’ she was explaining. ‘He said the smoke irritated his throat. So I did. Not at once, I grant you – after a few quick puffs. I know it’s not fair to give the young cancer. We’d been for an Indian meal. I opened the window and threw it out and he told me to shut the window. He jostled me. Then he called me a toe-rag.’