Miss Carter's War (43 page)

The gates of the school were locked. There was barbed wire on top of the fence. It kept marauders out and pupils in. That’s the way it was nowadays. As she stood, staring through the gate, rain dripping from her skirt and hands and chin, she remembered how it had been with Duane, when people came and went as they pleased, a community school, and she felt angry and guilty that she had gone along with the compromise of his vision. She wanted no more of it. The sterile approach to education. The kowtowing to the mindless law that had defeated Tony.

‘Fuck you all!’ she screamed through the gate.

I’m going mad, she thought, as she made her way home via the Carpenter’s Arms, only remembering when she saw its new blinds and pavement tables that Bob and Florrie had retired to run a bed-and-breakfast place in Devon. So they were happy. She tried to be pleased for them and the young couple that passed her, cuddling under an umbrella, but she just felt jealous. And even more alone.

When she got home, she stripped off her sodden clothes and sat, naked, eating a slice of stale bread and Marmite. Shivering, she ran a bath and lay in it, gulping a glass of wine. As her body thawed, she felt a flicker of life, the need to do something; she had no idea what. She got out of the bath and stood bewildered, muttering, ‘Pull yourself together.’ She examined in the mirror her hunched, skinny body, she tried to touch her toes, and couldn’t. Tony had always insisted that exercise was better for depression than pills, hadn’t he? He attributed Donald’s high spirits to his daily dance and practice regime.

‘OK, darling, I’ll try that,’ she said out loud.

She rushed into the bedroom, grabbed a pair of old slacks and a T-shirt. It had stopped raining so she just wore a cardigan and plimsolls. Wrapping her old bathing costume in a towel, she made for the local sports centre.

At the desk, she was about to ask for her ticket when the blonde receptionist shrieked over her head, ‘Benedict, Peter, how lovely to see you. Where have you been all my life?’

Mouth caught open, ready to speak, Marguerite turned to see two young men ambling through the door, swinging squash racquets, the personification of the young upwardly mobile breed that had been gentrifying her area. Marguerite hated both of them on sight on Tony’s behalf. Their vulgar offices were replacing the docks where men had done proper work, he would have said. She would have too, if she could have made herself heard, but now one of them was talking loudly into a huge, just-about portable, phone about some deal he was broking, whilst the other drawled over Marguerite’s head about his ‘out of this world trip to Ibiza with ecstasy of every sort’; this was accompanied by a discreet pantomime of swallowing a pill and reaching orgasm.

The mime was the first indication that either of them were aware of Marguerite’s presence, so she said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about me. I may look old, but I know all about drugs and fucking. Now, my dear, do you think you could possibly spare a moment to give me a ticket for a swim?’ The silence was palpable as Marguerite marched through the barrier.

She decided to have a sauna to sweat out some of the poison of grief. A man was already sitting in the room, pouring with perspiration. His eyes flicked in her direction as she entered, but he did not acknowledge her. Indeed, after that cursory first glance, she seemed to disappear off his radar. She didn’t exist for him. How else to explain his uninhibited groping and scratching of his genitals? She did not flatter herself that he was being sexual. Surely it would have been a more appealing gesture if so? No, he had deemed her not worth noticing. Even when she coughed, he continued ministering to his crotch.

She could think of nothing to say. ‘Will you stop that?’ could well make him angry, or worse, surprised and embarrassed that there was actually someone there, who had feelings, was once a woman, a category into which, to him, she no longer fitted. So she held her tongue, whilst he held his balls. With as much dignity as she could muster from her shattered ego, she left the room, showered and dived into the pool.

As she glided through the water, she tried to imagine it was washing through her body. There was no one else in the pool, so she could close her eyes, sigh and groan, as her body stretched and relaxed in turn. She was actually beginning to enjoy the feeling, when her reverie was disturbed by a noisy splash and large waves raised by the man from the steam room, who was throwing his sweaty body into the water, ignoring the notices requesting people to shower first.

Marguerite tried to continue her sedate breaststroke, despite the turbulence caused by his ungainly crawl. Her training in the Scottish lochs for the SOE had made her an elegant swimmer. She had not had much practice other than occasional forays to the pool with Tony, but she found a rhythm that despite her age propelled her smoothly forward. She was conscious of the man accelerating his speed. Some of the old aggression stirred in Marguerite and she changed to her stylish crawl, easily gaining half a length on him. Splashing and coughing, Thatcher’s competitive child desperately tried to catch her up, but she pulled out all the stops, and, using every ounce of her strength, did a few strokes of dazzling butterfly, leaving him standing in the shallow end, trying to look nonchalant. Marguerite leapt out of the pool and stood, panting, legs astride, hands on hips, staring down, willing him to meet her gaze. And he did. For the first time. With something akin to awe. Marguerite glowed.

‘Hello,’ she said and waited expectantly, until eventually he muttered a confused, ‘Hello.’ He stood gawping, his errant hands now scratching his head, as she turned on her heel and strode triumphantly into the changing room.

She walked back to Myddelton Square with a new spring in her step, despite having exhausted herself at the pool. She felt as if she had won a major victory, not only over the itchy man – he was irrelevant – but over herself. Her old fighting spirit was seeping back. Half-Full Lizzie Dripping was still in there somewhere. As she went down Pentonville Road she saw several people standing outside a newsagent’s reading papers and talking to one another. The headline read, ‘Maggie Resigns’.

Back home, she opened a tin of baked beans, toasted the stale bread, brewed a cup of tea and settled in front of the television. She watched Margaret Thatcher leaving 10 Downing Street, having seemingly been stabbed in the back by her own party. After her smooth smiling speech of farewell, the camera peered into the car as it drove off, revealing an unsettling image of the Iron Lady, red-eyed and tearful. ‘Good bloody riddance,’ she said on Tony’s behalf, but could not help remembering, with something like affection, the dowdy young woman with blazing blue eyes standing next to Anthony Eden at Dartford football ground. Marguerite’s early admiration of the woman had gradually disintegrated, egged on of course by Tony, starting with her disquiet at Thatcher’s chilling intransigence in the face of the deaths of ten young IRA hunger strikers. This relentless hard determination to do what she considered right continued, no matter what the cost, making the country a meaner and more selfish place, but as the television repeatedly showed the devastated, ousted woman, Marguerite wondered why things always seemed to end sadly.

When she was younger she, and certainly Tony, would have seen Thatcher’s demise as a golden opportunity to prepare to rid the country of the Tories at the next election, but Marguerite had lost all interest in politics. The days of passionate meetings in football grounds were over; it was all carefully orchestrated televised spectaculars, with obligatory standing ovations, pop groups, and a new breed called ‘celebrities’. She did not fit in any more. The same was true of her work for the Open University. She continued to do some tutoring, but the object was now preparing people for jobs rather than encouraging learning for the sheer love of it and her supervisor subtly made her aware that her emotional approach to literature was out of step with the current postmodernist thinking. Miss Fryer’s phrase ‘I am no longer relevant’ kept crawling, uninvited, into her brain.

Chapter 46

As various aspects of her life closed down, Marguerite was hideously aware of time. Whereas in the past she was always rushing about, trying to do several things at once, now the days were limitless deserts. Over the interminable weeks that stretched into endless months, she drifted around trying to find a reason for existing. She forced herself to go to galleries, concerts and the theatre but could not master the art of enjoying things for herself. She ached to share everything with Tony, to discuss a new film into the small hours, to relish Donald’s rapturous reaction to a picture, a performance, a soufflé, a flower, to help a pupil open their heart to a poem. Encountering beauty, her first reaction had always been: Must show Tony, or Donald, or Class 3; she realised she was only fully alive through and for other people. It was a fatal flaw when age or circumstance left one alone.

She tried to make friends with the yuppie couple that had bought Tony’s flat, but the only communication they managed was her banging on the ceiling with a broom when their thumping music and squawking voices went on way after midnight, and she heard herself referred to, through the open windows, as ‘that miserable old cow downstairs’.

She realised her isolation was not unique when, treating herself one day to tea in Fortnum and Mason’s, she became fascinated by an elderly woman, wearing a heavy brown tweed cloak, a head-hugging cloche hat and pearl earrings, and with crimson lipstick bleeding into the lines around her mouth, sitting majestically erect, one hand clutching a silver-topped walking stick. She picked up her bill, and squinted at it through a pair of pince-nez on a gold chain round her neck. She repeatedly tried to get the attention of the waiter with fluttering waves of her gloved hand. He obsequiously continued to attend to everyone but her, so she vigorously struck the sugar bowl, and sent it crashing to the floor. For one glorious moment, she commanded everyone’s attention. It mattered not that her audience were disapproving, because for the two minutes it took to pay the bill and sweep out the world was aware of her existence. Something of the woman she once was coloured her exit. Marguerite wanted to applaud. As the woman wove her way out of sight through the shop, Marguerite saw her shoulders drop, and her pace hesitate, as she shrank back into her wizened shell.

The waiter ignored Marguerite too. He, in fact, treated her with disdain bordering on disgust. Walking down Piccadilly she caught sight of herself reflected in Hatchard’s shop window, and felt some sympathy for him. She looked a freak. There was no reason of person or occasion for her to dress up, so she habitually chose comfort over elegance. This involved a pair of well-worn trainers, tracksuit bottoms for their comfy, loose waist, and either a voluminous Sloppy Joe jumper that had belonged to Tony or, if it was very cold, her smelly thirty-year-old Afghan coat. She dragged her grey curls back with an elastic band and didn’t bother with make-up. She was not a pretty sight. She didn’t give a damn.

After the night in each other’s arms on the earth floor of the borie, she strips off and washes under the waterfall. Marcel watches as she puts on her crumpled, grubby frock and wooden shoes. He places a wild rose in her tangled hair. ‘Comme tu es belle,’ he says.

People edged away from her as she continued her walk down Piccadilly, chuckling to herself, wondering whether to alarm them further by following the example of Tony in his cruising days, by asking someone for a light, even though she no longer smoked. She could use it to set on fire the sleazy cinema showing dirty films that defiled the hitherto pleasant street. She lingered, as she always did, at Piccadilly Circus, dreading seeing Elsie there, although she longed to know how she had fared since she last saw her over a decade ago. Occasionally she went to the Bull Ring. This was now packed full of homeless people. It had been dubbed Cardboard City. Not many people ventured in but Marguerite wandered among the tragic outcasts in a futile quest for information. She had almost accepted that Elsie was probably dead yet clung to the faint hope that she was, as she had said at their last meeting, a survivor. Looking down Shaftesbury Avenue towards Soho she wondered too about Jimmy. She had never rid herself of the regret that she could not help him out of the morass into which he had sunk. She thought how pleased Tony would be to know that her Messiah complex was a thing of the past. She had no lame ducks or great causes in her life now, and pace Tony, she felt lost without them.

After the funeral, she had kept in touch with Tony’s mother for a while, until, her link with Ethel being mainly because of Tony, she let it go. When she received a phone call from the carer who had come to London telling her that Ethel had been moved to a hospital, she felt duty bound, for Tony’s sake, to go up and visit her.

At the main reception of the huge hospital they looked up the name and directed her across the concourse to ‘our new wing, we are very proud of it’. She had to ring the front doorbell and when, eventually, somebody unlocked the door and let her in, she could hear screaming in what sounded like terror. The nurse said, ‘Take no notice. It’s only Keith.’ A woman passed by, walking unnaturally slowly, looking straight ahead with no acknowledgement of Marguerite and the nurse, who ignored her and said, ‘We are the most state of the art dementia ward in Britain. Isn’t it lovely? Let me show you around.’

As they went down the wide corridor Marguerite could not but agree. Big ensuite rooms, pot plants, paintings, and pleasant relaxed staff but, oh God, the patients. Did they notice the brightly coloured curtains, the sunny yellow walls? One lay on the floor, howling like a wolf, lashing out at any kindly hand that reached towards him. He had a beard and wore a cardigan. An academic like her perhaps? Reduced to writhing rage at his disappearing mind?