CHAPTER FIVE
It had
just gone
True, she might have to contend with the
ceaseless noise of the numerous heavy vehicles, including lorries and
double-decker buses, which passed up and down the busy main road outside; to
listen to the local drunks shouting and brawling outside the all-too-local pub
at night; to put up with occasional all-night parties in the immediate
vicinity; to bear with the mind-numbing disturbance of some neighbourhood
shop's unchecked burglar alarm every so often; or to live with noisy young
juveniles playing their uncouth games in the adjoining streets and next-door
back garden during the afternoon. But,
all these and a host of other things besides, she still maintained that she was
to some extent compensated by the consolation of knowing she was mostly her own
boss in her own unpleasant little world, independent of those towering
monoliths she regarded as infra dignum.
Gus Evidence, a laconic West Indian who worked
at a local engineering plant specializing in precision tools, didn't normally
arrive home until around 6.00pm, so Mary almost invariably spent the afternoons
either dozing, listening to the radio, or reading books, albeit the kinds of
books which her son, with his predilection for the classics, inevitably
regarded as of inferior quality. Apart
from a few occasional attempts at serious literature in her youth, Mary
Evidence had absolutely no inclination, these days, to read works in that
category, preferring the general run-of-the-mill library romance or
thriller. But so much for that, and each
to his or her individual tastes! She
would read what her tastes and temperament permitted her to, and no more!
Having dusted and swept-up in the kitchen
at the rear of her flat, prepared herself a small though nutritious salad, and
brewed some mild tea, she took herself into the bedroom with tea in hand and
sprawled out on the convertible settee which stood bathed in sunlight beneath
the large front window there, expressly with the intention of reading from just
one such romance - a novel by a certain Martin Curly entitled Nursed Back to Health.
Opening it on page 69, she began, tentatively and without real enthusiasm, to
read:-
"I wanted the nurse
more and more with each appearance she made in the ward. She had only to hold my wrist in order to
check my pulse and, to all intents and purposes, I could swear it virtually
doubled. When she reached across the bed
of my nearest neighbour to straighten his blankets or, better still from my
point of view, bent down to tuck them in, I could swear my vision became ten
times sharper at the sight of her sexy black-stockinged
legs, the sudden violence of her movements momentarily exposing a glimpse of
thighs which were among the most seductive I had ever seen. She was indeed sexy in the best sense of that
word, with firm legs, a shapely behind, ample breasts, fleshy arms, a pretty
face, and a mound of pinned-up hair, dark and fine, such as one usually only
encountered on women of good breeding.
"We had scarcely spoken save in the context of matters
appertaining to my health and comfort, but I sensed that she delighted in my
presence, as I in hers, by what seemed to me the extraordinary efforts she was
making to conceal her desire, to avoid looking at me too closely, to steady her
nerves, and even by the way she remained shyly reserved with me in
conversation, when she was anything but reserved with most of the other
patients, seeming to overdo the formality of each routine visit as, with
slightly moist palms, she checked my pulse or took my temperature. Indeed, on more than one occasion I had
caught her looking at me when she evidently thought my attention elsewhere! But she swiftly averted her gaze and returned
it to the business to hand, as soon as my optical penetration had found her
out.
"The realization that I would soon be well enough to leave
hospital encouraged me to stroll round the ward more often, and even to strike
up friendly though inconsequential conversation with a number of my fellow
patients who, for the most part, were still confined to their beds in various
stages of post-op somnolence.
Nevertheless, I was in some concern regarding my little nurse who, in
all probability, would drift out of my life as casually as she had drifted into
it, soon to forget that I had ever existed.
Well, if that was the case, I would just have to bear up to it and carry
on as best I could. Fortunately,
however, I still had the consolation of knowing that such pessimistic
conjectures in no way detracted from my admiration of her many physical assets,
which somehow struck me as inviolable anyway, since belonging to one of those
special categories of esteemed females of whom nurses, nuns, and teachers
comprise the most conspicuous examples; women whose near-angelic activities
seem to prohibit, in men, the formulation of lewd thoughts and, more
especially, lewd actions in relation to their physical persons.
"However that may be I felt it incumbent on me to 'make'
this curvaceous little angel if it was the last thing I did, my sole intention
at this juncture in time being to take her in my arms and let her know just how
much I thought of her, how much I wanted her, how much I would satisfy her,
irrespective of the adversity I might encounter from the elderly Sister for
accosting a junior nurse in the throes of ward duties. The question was not whether
but when could a rendezvous be arranged on the sly?"
Mary
Evidence put down the book at this point and reflected, while sipping some tea,
upon the number of words she had been obliged to skip because of an inadequate
education. True, she had grasped the
gist of the narrative thus far. But that
wasn't enough to prevent her from feeling annoyed with herself
for having to indulge in yet another superficial assimilation of the many
difficult words and phrases encountered, Curly's
novel being more complex and even highbrow than she had initially
suspected. Ah well, maybe she simply
wasn't in the mood to lavish patience on this brand of literary foreplay
today. She would give it another try, however, because there was little else to do but read
at this time of day and, besides, the afternoon still had some hours to run.
…"As it happened, an
opportunity fell to me to make my desires known to Nurse Adams the day before
my discharge. For I
accidentally-on-purpose touched the back of her left thigh with my right hand
as she dramatically bent over my bedside locker to retrieve a book she had
knocked to the floor while making my empty bed, and, in doing so, caused her to
smile in what I took to be rather a coquettish fashion. Caught between a disinclination to make a
blundering fool of myself and an overwhelming inclination to appease my desire,
I had unwittingly proffered an ambiguous gesture which, fortunately for me, met
with her approval. However, now that her
attention was momentarily fixed on me, I hastened to consolidate my advantage
by placing an arm round her waist, while she, in what I could only suppose to
be instinctive reciprocity, delicately brushed her hand over my forehead and
smoothed my mop of hair, thereby inducing me to smile up at her from where I
was sitting. Since my nearest neighbour
was preoccupied in his customary studious fashion, and nobody else seemed to be
aware of us, I furtively slipped my right hand down the back of her left thigh
again and gently ran it up and down the flesh above her stocking top a few
times, while simultaneously looking up at her with an eye to catching her
approval. Blushing profusely, she
moistened her lips and, bending down, kissed me tenderly on the brow. She evidently approved of my act!
"However, not wishing to get caught in such an amorous
position by anyone in the ward, least of all her superiors, and, fearing that I
might have the audacity to take matters further, Nurse Adams quickly disengaged
herself from my wandering hand and summarily made off in the direction of a
nearby patient, an old sod on the other side of the ward who, to judge by the
pathetic noise he was making, evidently had need of some urgent medical
attention! That being the case, I
straightaway groped for my writing pad and scribbled my nurse a brief note to
the effect that I desperately wanted to see her after my discharge, adding, in
block capitals, my full name and address, together with telephone number, and
concluding with a line in praise of her beauty.
I slipped the note, suitably folded, into her hand at the first
favourable opportunity later that day, taking care to ascertain whether this
further gesture met with her approval.
It did! She smiled reassuringly
and then safely tucked it into her breast pocket. The deed was done!"
Yawning
profusely, Mary Evidence closed the book, got up from her settee, and returned
to the kitchen, wherein she proceeded to eat her salad. She was of the opinion that it was always
wiser to leave the salad there an hour or two in order to have sufficient time
to acquire an appetite, and now that one had arisen she lost no time in placating
it.
Oddly enough, it was at this point that her
mind began to return to what her son had said, the previous evening, about his
hereditary influences, the main reasons for his innate coolness towards her and
preference, during childhood, for his maternal grandmother, a rheumatic old Galway
woman with a loving smile who had died when he was barely nine years old, to be
shipped back to Ireland for burial. It
was rather vexing to her that he should now choose to uncover and understand
things which, out of tact, she had contrived to hide from him in the past,
especially in light of the fact that he seemed to know on which side of the
ethnic divide that effectively though unofficially existed between them his
bread was buttered, so to speak, and had no qualms about being ruthlessly frank
with her. Had he not been so much a
product of his late-father's genetic legacy, of the sperm which that man had
sown during his brief but productive existence, Michael would doubtless have
viewed her in a rosier light. But the
Savage in him was too strong and this, with her predominantly loyalist
instincts, Mary Evidence bitterly regretted.
She, too, was largely a product of her
father, a Donegal Protestant who had met his Catholic wife-to-be while serving
with the British army in
Once there, they swiftly acquired the lease
of a pub which the pair of them were to run, amid much bickering and
quarrelling, until such time as Michael's father-to-be further complicated
matters by appearing on the scene and precipitating Mary into the worse
calamity, from her viewpoint, of a hastily arranged and fundamentally misguided
marriage, a marriage she thought would save her from her domineering mother but
which was soon to flounder on the rocks of an apparently compatible but
essentially incompatible relationship between socially and ethnically
mismatched partners. For Patrick Savage
was an entirely different kettle-of-fish from anything she had known before,
the middle-class product of a deeply intellectual and catholic family who, try
as she might, had about as much interest in becoming an assistant publican as
in abandoning the more stimulating company of his friends in other public
places.
Reluctantly, Mary Evidence pondered awhile
the unfortunate consequences of that premature, unsettled, and subsequently
short-lived marriage to a man whose social and occupational intransigence was a
contributory factor in bringing about the demise, through flagging revenue and
willpower alike, of their business, duly resulting in the return of both mother
and daughter, plus tiny son, to the town from whence they had previously come,
where alternative accommodation and, in her case, menial work were assured them
through old contacts. This return, she
reflected, was probably for the best, so far as young Michael was
concerned. For although he had
subsequently experienced an unhappy and unsettled childhood in the sole company
of his mother and grandmother, had suffered from undernourishment
and physical neglect, missed out on a considerable amount of elementary
schooling (though by the time he went to school at six-and-a-half years of age
he could already read simple books, thanks to the private tuition of a local
priest), and, following his protective grandmother's death, been sent to a
Protestant Children's Home in Carshalton Beeches (from whence he immediately
wrote a shocked letter informing his mother that the house parents of the
place, being Baptist, were of 'the wrong faith' - a thing he would never cease
to hold against her thereafter), he had nevertheless managed to weather the
storm, make a few friends in Surrey, improve in health, and acquire, through an
intellectual persistency doubtless inherited from his father's side of the
family, an uncommonly high standard of education. So, in spite of his misfortunes, he still had
something for which to be grateful.
However, as to her son's attitude to
England, she realized, despite his English upbringing, that he was not and
would never become an Englishman, but always be an outsider: a quiet,
withdrawn, solitary man who would rely on himself as much as possible rather
than seek an accommodation, culturally or professionally, with that which was
fundamentally alien to him and for which he had no great respect.... Not that
he was incapable of establishing close ties with the odd individual here and
there if the opportunity presented itself, a big 'if', however, in view of the
extent of his latter-day solitariness!
Still, even if he hadn't found a mind worthy of his attentions since
moving from Surrey, and didn't profess the warmest of attitudes towards his
mother's largely philistine mentality, nonetheless he had acquired, through
reading and observation, a number of useful realizations which partly mitigated
the pain of his ethnic isolation.
Yet his mother had been extremely vexed
when, following the pattern of his daily ruminations of late, he had suddenly
sprung that piece of genetic detection on her in his endeavour to comprehend
the reasons why he had become so solitary, why he favoured one thing rather
than another, why he disagreed with her on so many issues, why he was so often
discontented with life, so often sad.
"By Christ!" he had said to her one evening, "most other
men in my position would have committed suicide by now."
"Oh, don't be so silly!" she had
automatically responded, not quite understanding him. "Why don't you go out and meet
someone?"
"Meet someone?" he had
incredulously echoed. "And just where do you suppose I'm
going to do that?" But the
implication of what he regarded as his intellectual and moral superiority over
most others in this inner-city environment was wasted on her, and whenever he
sought to remind her that he was the product of a broken marriage, that his
self-hatred partly derived from the fact that she had not only married socially
above herself but to some extent ethnically contrary to herself, in consequence
of which he had never known his father and was of ambivalent class and ethnic
allegiance, she would tell him not to dig up the past because the past was dead
and he ought to be living in the present.
As if the tortuous present wasn't in some measure conditioned by the past! It was the present that was troubling him
because he was living as a kind of shadow of his father and absolutely
despising his mother, not having anywhere else to go in the evenings but to her
place.
And so the plot thickens as we come to the
realization that, after barely six months out of England, his mother had married
the first good-looking man to come her way, her congenial and protective father
having already passed away and accordingly engendered in her the need to escape
from the clutches of what she regarded as an imperious, unreasoning, and
contemptuous Catholic mother.... With the unfortunate consequence that, in
jumping out of the familial frying pan of mother/daughter friction, she had
duly landed smack in the ethnic fire of premature marriage to a staunchly
Catholic Irishman who hadn't realized, initially, that her Catholicism was only
a thin cultural veneer, so to speak, over her late-father's Protestant
influence, and that she was the daughter of someone, moreover, who had married
a British soldier and spent many years of her life outside the country. In consequence of which their marriage, beset
by deprecatory rumours, would quickly go
downhill, with the inevitable corollary of separation and, so far as Mary was
concerned, the difficulty of bringing up a young son in conditions of acute
poverty, living with her rheumatic mother in an upstairs front room of an old
house on the Victoria Road in Aldershot.
In fact, it was this latter aspect of her
social make up, this confinement to poverty in such a densely urban part of North
London as she was now living in that her son, with his traditionally suburban
sympathies, artistic temperament, and intellectual aspirations - which had been
given a boost by several years domicile in leafy Carshalton Beeches - mainly
objected to, insofar as he would have preferred to feel more compatible within
the family link, to have had a mother who would appreciate and encourage his
literary ambitions rather than one who, by her actions and thoughts, only
sufficed to remind him that he was the product of a failed marriage, an
incompatible and short-lived parental liaison.
His impatience with her was more often than not the manifestation,
purely and simply, of a young intellectual's defence mechanism designed to
protect him from the encroaching influences of an alien lifestyle and to
maintain, as far as possible, his studious integrity in the midst of an
unsympathetic and often hostile environment, particularly now that his mother's
ethnic sympathies were channelled into the bonds of her second marriage, with
her allegiance to Gus - the dour, unambitious,
television-addicted West Indian who only succeeded, it seemed to Michael, in
further accentuating the underlying ethnic disparities which already existed
between them and making him feel even more unwanted than before.
Well, that was how things were,
irrespective of any good intentions he may have had. Things were what they were, and for good
reason. History could never be reversed. He would just have to put up with the
indifference and largely commonplace attitudes of his mother and stepfather
until he either found someone suitable with whom to set up home or acquired
himself quieter and more congenial lodgings.
That was all!
Having consumed her salad and returned to
the settee in the front room, Mary Evidence decided to spend the rest of the
afternoon merely dozing, since there wasn't anything to which she particularly
wanted to listen on the radio, and that extract from Nursed Back to Health,
with its highbrow connotations and general beating about the bush, hadn't
really fulfilled her initial expectations, so didn't warrant further attention
this afternoon. She would see how she
felt about it the following day.
For the time being, however, she might just
as well delve into the pages of her own unwritten book, the book of her life,
to see if she could discover anything especially worth remembering, anything
unusual that had happened to her during the course of her humble existence,
rather than a rehash of long-standing grievances - like the recollection, for
instance, of what had happened in connection with her father's funeral, all
those years ago, when, given due military honours, his bier was wheeled through
Ulster to the Donegal border with the Irish Republic by a cortège of mixed
military and civilian composition, the civilians all northern Protestants who
had no idea that he had married a southern Catholic because he had always been
careful to hide that fact from his relatives and who, on encountering a priest
at the border, now turned back in shock and embarrassment while the military
continued apace towards Carndonagh, the destination
of his burial, along with the startled priest and such Catholic relatives,
including her mother, as had either directly or circuitously made their way
from various parts of Britain and the Irish Republic to his ancestral
home. She had been with her mother at
the time and was only too glad, despite the shock of hearing firsthand from the
priest later on, that she hadn't been party to that larger cortège which, out
of sectarian intransigence, had been unwilling to cross the border and follow
their relative's coffin to its final resting-place. Even now the thought of what had happened
that fateful day still rankled with her, though something inside her told her
that his secret was bound to have been found out one day anyway, and that he
probably got no more than he deserved.
Frantically, she scanned her memory for
more agreeable material to delve into, like that time some twenty years ago
when she had given birth to a girl which, following baptism, was subsequently
entrusted to the care of local foster parents.
It was such a sweet little child that life could have been so much
better if fate had permitted her to keep it.
But the fact was she lacked adequate domestic facilities, had to work at
an hotel in
As it happened, she had just turned
twenty-three when the 'accident' that led to the birth of her baby
occurred. It was a Thursday afternoon
and, being off work that day, she had dressed up and gone out for a leisurely
stroll. Not having had any sex for a
number of months, she didn't mind the idea of giving somebody handsome a good
long, lingering look at her shapely legs if the opportunity were to present
itself. She had opted for a red skirt
and a white blouse, she recalled, and had taken the precaution of putting on a
clean set of white underclothes, including a matching petticoat, with her
then-customary black stockings and high heels.
The weather was agreeably warm, and her stroll had taken her to a pleasantly
deserted location out towards Farnborough, where she had decided to sit on the
grass and while away an hour or two with the help of a women's magazine. As luck would have it, she hadn't been
sitting there longer than twenty minutes when she noticed a fairly handsome,
clean-shaven man of about thirty, possibly an off-duty soldier,
take a nearby seat from which he proceeded to stare at her in a conspicuously
shameless manner. Maybe she ought to let
him see a bit more of herself, she thought, considering that he was seated in a
favourable position, with his bright-blue eyes fixed firmly upon her face.
Yes, she ought to do something daring, now there was no-one else about to inhibit her. So she lay back on the grass and, keeping her
attention superficially fixed on the magazine in her hands, opened her legs
just wide enough to give him optical access to what lay between them. And how well she remembered her next
move! How, after a few polite exchanges
during which it was ascertained that he was only too interested in sampling
what she had on offer, they went off together to a more remote part of the
field where, out of harm's reach from marauding eyes, he proceeded to sample it
for all he was worth, his large powerful hands busily caressing her body, as
his small though far from powerless tongue elected to probe her flesh.
Yes, he was very powerful all over and
would dominate and condition her every move.
Soon her clothes were in complete disarray. She sensed the futility of putting up a
struggle with him, of running the risk of getting her clothing torn. After all, she had voluntarily brought this
upon herself and would just have to take the consequences. He had her where he wanted her. There was absolutely no point in trying to
close her legs, not now that something hard had forced its way up between them
and violated the sanctity of her womb, driving its way deep into the cavernous
depths of her vaginal interior with a ferocity which momentarily caused her to
wet her drawers and loose her sphincter in the confusion of the moment.
