Sunday Best (13 page)

Listen to me. I have tried to tell you before. I really have tried. But now I can tell you. My petticoats permit me. Listen. My father is dead, and it was I who killed him. I as a child, hearing him making a man out of my mother that night of my twelfth birthday. Listen to me. I know I have tried your patience for so long. I have lied, deceived and omitted, but now it's truth I have to tell.

It was that roll of wire. I don't know where it came from or what its purpose was, but it had lain on the shelf in my bedroom for as long as I could remember. Each night it was the last thing I saw before my eyes shut of their own accord, and it coiled my dreams in strangled nightmares. Like any small boy, I longed for amoeba-like dreams without packaging, and that night on my twelfth birthday, I put the roll to some use. I crept out of bed, and tied one end to the bannister support at the top of the stairs. The other end I hooked on a spare rail on the opposite side, yet another longstanding object that cried out for function. I surveyed my trap with deep satisfaction, and I crept back into bed. It did not occur to me that my mother would be the first to descend. A child knows with instinctive faith that murder has its own justice. I crouched under the blankets and heard my father's roar. Listen to me, for I must tell it to you again, for it is a phrase that has throbbed my heart and that I cannot rinse from my ears. He had done with my mother, I suppose, and as he left the room, he threw it at her. ‘Clap yer thighs shut, woman. Yer meat stinks.'

I heard their door open, and his clomping step outside. Then almost immediately, the crash. I was afraid to get up, but I heard my mother screaming, and it was for my own protection that I ran to her side.

My father lay on the hall floor, nearly as dead as Mr Johnson, and I hoped desperately, but obviously too late, that my trap had failed. The broken wire dripped on to the staircase,
and my mother was staring at it, and then at me, and there was no doubt in her mind as to the connection.

Yes, I killed my father. You have known me long enough. You have been patient with me. You know I am a man who apologizes seldom, and then with great difficulty. Many years ago,
il y a longtemps
, but now there is no need for that, because I am beginning to handle the patricide with my own acknowledged confession. Many years ago, I killed a man. I killed my father, and let my petticoats release my repentance. I am sorry. I am truly sorry.

They all left the little chapel, and I stayed there weeping, in order to bury him for the first time.

As I mourned, I remembered him telling me stories. Even those winter fields I could recall with an understanding that was born of my sudden love. My whole father-studded childhood pounced on me in episodic joy and pain, but all this I could peacefully accommodate. I felt like a drowning man who recalls his past, disconnected, parenthetical, but with irrefutable totality. And indeed, I was drowning, for my last image was the frontage of the butcher's shop with the proud name of VERREY SMITH painted and repainted over the generations across the panelled front. And then Verrey Smith died inside me, and I left the chapel, nameless, anonymous, but at peace.

I walked for a long time, up and down streets that I had known for many years. I felt my rambling as a kind of valediction, that I would possibly never tread this route again, I found myself going home, as a last port of call. I went up to my study and packed a small suitcase. Automatically I put in my trousers and jackets, a few shirts and some underwear. I left the clothes and the trimmings my wife had bequeathed me. Though I was not quite myself, whatever that myself was, I still had the cunning to cover my tracks. I intended that George Verrey Smith should disappear, and as far as my wife was concerned, and everybody else for that matter, that he should disappear as a man. For in fact, that was, after all, the true nature of my disappearance. I took what little money I had left, taking care to leave my passport and cheque book conspicuously in evidence on my desk, and crept out of my back door to a new life, I knew not where, how or in what name.

My steps took me towards the school. It was getting dark
now, and I had no watch, but as I reached the schoolyard, I saw by the lights in the basement that it was caretaker time. I walked through the playground with faint regrets at the passing of my schoolmastering days, and, as I passed the maintenance shed, I heard a small half-joyful groan. Standing to one side, so that I might not be seen, I had an eyeful of the indomitable Parsons having it off with Washington Jones, one of our quota from the lower third. I turned away, slightly sickened by what I saw, and glad in my heart to be a woman.

I waited at the bus-stop outside the school. I did not fear boarding a bus, being in close observance of other people. Even the excitement of the con was on the wane. I no longer thought of myself as deceiving anybody. I
was
a woman, in heart and in mind, and deception was no longer a valid proposition.

When the bus arrived, I sat inside. I felt it unladylike to mount the stairs. Such daring would come later, when I ceased to throb under my petticoats. There were few people in the bus and I was able to take a front seat for myself. I looked out of the window, seeing one or two familiar faces, boys from school, shopkeepers and their wives out for the evening. I felt it was illogical to recognize them, for the man who had known them, and acknowledged them each day, was no more. And I knew that there would come a time when my Verrey Smith past would be unrecognizable, so much would I have absorbed my new identity.

And then I saw Miss Price, and I knew that wherever I was, and under whatever guise, the memory of that alarming lady would be with me always. She carried her lonely string shopping bag and clasped a pile of exercise books to that part of her anatomy which in obvious women would be called breast. The conscientious Miss Price always took work home, together with her single lamb chop, and a packet of frozen spinach that was good for her. I watched her probably for the last time and her screaming loneliness pierced me. Yet today perhaps had been one of her happiest, when her Cloth had needed her and she had carried to him, together with the bandages, her sad and stubborn love. I knew I would miss her terribly. Then, as the bus turned the corner and lost her, it suddenly seemed to me right and proper to take upon myself her name. I could do no better than confirm in this way my regard. And so I became Price,
with the forename of Emily for sound backing, and the status of widowhood for good measure.

The station was crowded with homegoing commuters, Queues of passengers waited at the ticket booths, or scrambled with their seasons through the barrier. She was pushed and jostled with the rest of them, and with no apology. That was part of the deal too, she thought, and she regretted the lack of gallantry. She waited with patience, and growing inner calm, and as she grew accustomed to her name, rehearsing it in whispers, her voice took on a gentler pitch. Gradually her body was drained of all the anger and the rage that had so lately and for so long held tenancy. She reached the grille, where Emily Price, recently widowed, and in gentle tones, requested a single ticket to Brighton.

When night fell, with no sign of George, Mrs Verrey Smith decided that the time had come to start worrying. Anxiety would come later, and after that, perhaps sadness. With her great sense of order, one emotion could only be the direct outcome of another. In her feeling patterns, there was no overlap, and she thought that perhaps, whatever happened, she would never reach the sadness stage. Maybe it would be a great relief. For life with George had not been easy.

Joy Verrey Smith, or Joy Patton, as she had been, had had to come to terms with much in her life. Her mother had died while giving her birth, and her father had never ceased to blame her for it. He had married again, unhappily, and blamed his daughter again for this virago of a second wife. Notwithstanding, he had given her a complete education, and she had trained to be a teacher. She loathed her father, a loathing that was fed by a natural disinclination to her stepmother, but most of all, she disliked herself, and her sole ambition in life was to get married in order to get out of her father's home. It did not occur to her that she could have left home without the drastic step of marriage, but marriage would be an act of self-punishment, and she felt obliged to contribute to the price of her mother's death. This being her only motive, she cared little for the kind of man who would deliver her. Had she been less desperate, she would have examined George Verrey Smith more carefully, but she had rushed him into wedlock not daring to allow herself more time to consider him.

They had met at their amateur dramatic society. Her first part was in a farce. She had played the maid, and George was cast in the role of her mistress's lover. On the sudden unexpected arrival of the husband, George was obliged to change roles with the maid, and to don her clothes. He was desperately unfunny in his part, and during their four nights' run
in the local church hall, hardly a titter arose from an audience overwhelmingly related to the cast, and ready to make allowances. But throughout George's cavortings on stage, willing as they were, they could only raise a tired smile, and the only person in the hall who seemed unembarrassed by the proceedings, and indeed, who was positively enjoying them, was George himself. But Joy was willing to overlook all that. It wasn't, after all, as if she wanted to marry an actor. Besides, there were certain qualities George had, difficult to pin-point, she had to admit to herself, but surely there. After the mercifully short run of their first play together, George was never given another part, and he sulked in the wings as assistant stage manager, while any part of a maid that was in the offing went to Joy. And it was probably in this role that George found her most attractive. He too was anxious to free himself from a suffocating mother, and they courted each other, desperately and superficially, and with no questioning on either side, they were married.

The first year had passed uneventfully, though George had displayed certain quirks of behaviour which Joy had thought strange, but which, because of her inexperience, she accepted as part of the marriage pattern. It was normal, she thought, that men could make love to women only if they had corsets on, or perhaps, as in George's case, if they were wearing a corset themselves. Sexual contact was always a nuisance to her anyway, but since it was part of her obligation in the marriage contract, she was prepared to attire herself as George wished. If she had to do it, she was going to do it well and decently, as Joy Verrey Smith did everything else. Joy was a perfectionist except perhaps in her own person. Though her house was spotless, she herself was unclean. She had less respect for skin than for mahogany, and though she would polish with a permanent duster in her hand, spring-cleaning the whole year round, a bath and a change of underwear were for her strictly seasonal. Joy Verrey Smith, née Patton, was an unhappy woman, but this too she had come to terms with, dissipating her energies in lavender polish and laundry. Neighbours who came to tea, which could have been, but wasn't, eaten off the floor, told her that she should start a family. She conveyed their advice to George, who thought it was none of their business. He reminded her that her mother had died when she herself was born, and he suggested that
that condition, like madness, was congenital, and he valued her too highly to allow her to run the same risk. She took this information back to her neighbours, who viewed it with suspicion, but suggested in any case, that adoption might be worth consideration. This advice, in its turn, was relayed to George, who reacted quite violently, more at the source of the suggestion, than at the suggestion itself. And so the whole business of children was shelved, and George bought her a pair of budgerigars. Spit and Polish, she called them, and she cleaned and cared for their cage as she might have looked after a pram. Spit and Polish gave Joy Verrey Smith something to live for, something around which her routine could revolve, punctuated twice daily with their feeding. Around about this time, she joined the local women's institute and she took on all kinds of voluntary work. If she could have been a mother, she would have joined the society for the prevention of cruelty to children, but in the budgerigar circumstances, she joined the anti blood-sports and vivisection campaigns. Joy Verrey Smith did nothing by halves. After the acquisition of her birds, her life became one round of meetings, protests and committees, and the odd corseted union with George became an event of seemingly less importance. Though she still accepted his strange little quirks, as she called them, she no longer saw them as normal. Indeed, as she moved more and more in the society of other women, she began to suspect something very perverse about her husband, and it was through the birds that her suspicions were finally confirmed.

It was her habit to buy a week's supply of birdseed and feed them regularly twice a day. Yet sometimes, by midweek, her stock had run out, and she considered whether George was feeding them too. He denied it, but she caught a strange flush over his face. Her seed-stock depleted itself more and more often over the next weeks and though she looked everywhere, she could not account for its disappearance. Until one Monday morning. George had gone to school, and Joy loaded the week's wash into her wheeler shopping cart to take it to the launderette. Mrs Bakewell was already there, and most of the neighbours. Monday morning at the launderette was a social event for Joy Verrey Smith. She had come to know the women intimately, and not only the women but their families too. Although she had only a nodding acquaintance with Mr Bakewell, she knew his underwear intimately. So much so,
that it had become embarrassing to acknowledge him, wondering whether he knew that she knew that his underpants were cotton-flowered, and his vest, whichever one he had on, was torn. The women seemed to have no shame in displaying what was after all a very private affair, and in an unlaundered state at that. For herself, she did not want to be wholly known, and she would turn away to shake out the underwear before loading it into the machine. And on that Monday morning as she turned about to shake out their smalls, a great shower of budgerigar seed scattered all over the launderette floor, and on investigation, she found that it had come from the two cups of her white brassière. She turned around and looked at the others with a sheepish grin. ‘Heaven knows how that got there,' she said feebly, knowing full well how, and more terribly, why. But she would deal with that later. Her neighbours would have to be pacified first. ‘I've been looking for that seed all week,' she tried manfully. ‘Must have dropped it into the laundry basket.' It didn't sound very feasible, but it would have to do. She finished loading the wash, trying to make her mind an absolute blank, and when it was done, she excused herself from the others, saying she wanted to do some quick shopping. She positively fled out of the launderette and found a café nearby. Hiding herself in a corner, her hands clasping a cup of froth she didn't want, she told herself it was time to think about what had happened. But try as she would, there was no alternative explanation of the presence of birdseed in her bra. He – my God, what kind of man had she married? – he had worn it. Of that there was no question. And he had stuffed the cups for authenticity. How long had it been going on? And what in heaven's name had he been wearing on top of the bra, and did he go out in it, and what kind of man …? Suddenly the corseted unions became clear to her, and certain of his habits, his liking for darning, or polishing, or even, occasionally, baking a cake. She didn't know what these sort of men were called, but she knew instinctively that they weren't normal. She was not moved by it; she simply had no patience with it. Whatever it was called in those fancy books by psychiatrists, it was dirty and rude, and she was enraged at the possibility of her poor little budgies going hungry in such a filthy cause: She decided that she would tackle him as soon as he came home. She would have liked to have been able to go into his study to ferret out
more evidence of his filth. But it was locked and double-locked, always, possibly in fear of that very intrusion. However, she had enough to go on with to confront him and perhaps more would emerge in the cross-examination.