An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [14]
When he’d fixed the ‘Bath in use’ notice on the door and gone stumping disapprovingly down the stairs, she pulled aside the blanket and peered into the yard. There was a high wind blowing a new moon through the clouds billowing above the chimney tops. She couldn’t see any women in the alley-way, nor had she ever. They were all images in Uncle Vernon’s wanton mind.
In the mirror above the wash-basin she spoke to Meredith. ‘Good evening. I’m Stella Bradshaw. I don’t expect you’ll ever want to love me’. It was only make-believe but her mouth trembled at the suggestion. She thought she looked haunted, as though there was a demon standing at her shoulder. Perhaps it had something to do with the swooping shadows thrown by the naked light bulb swinging in the draught from the window.
There was something wrong with her hair; she had too much forehead and her neck wasn’t long enough. When she wasn’t concentrating her eyebrows shot up and her mouth fell open. But then, when she willed her face to remain immobile, her mind stopped working. When she had first met Meredith she had noticed how he controlled the muscles of his cheeks, even though his eyes showed curiosity. She suspected it was education and breeding that enabled him to keep his face and his feelings separate. Bunny, who plainly came from the same sort of background as herself, hadn’t mastered the trick. Under pressure, particularly when ordering the stage hands about their business, he grimaced like a gargoyle.
She wet the loofah under the tap and flattened her hair down over her eyebrows. In the corridor of the upper circle she had seen a photograph of an actress dressed as a page-boy. She had asked Bunny who she was and Bunny had said it was someone or other in the role of Joan of Arc, and that she mustn’t go up there again because Rose Lipman wouldn’t like to find her wandering about the passages. Up there was Miss Lipman’s territory. As a girl she had been employed in the crush-bar, her arms immersed up to the elbows in beer slops. The bar had long since been done away with, but some compulsion drove Rose to climb the stairs, morning and evening, to stand vigil at the window overlooking the square. Bunny said that sometimes she let Meredith accompany her. She took a special interest in him on account of the affection she felt for his mother. Meredith had once asked her outright why she came there, and she spoke evasively of the state of the paint-work, and had he noticed the rat droppings on the bend of the stairs? He thought he saw tears in her eyes, although it was possibly only a trick of the gaslight, and he squeezed her arm in a little gesture of sympathy, and she said, looking not at him but out of the window, that she came because the past never went away, that it was always out there, waiting. Then Bunny had added, ‘Mind you, we only have Meredith’s version of it. And we all know how he likes to put words into other people’s mouths, don’t we?’ It was an unguarded thing to say, and Bunny clearly regretted it because a moment later, when Geoffrey butted in with some daft remark on how extraordinary it was that a woman of Miss Lipman’s humble beginnings should be aware of the theory of four-dimensional time, he had rounded on him and ticked him off for being disrespectful. Geoffrey had coloured up and marched out of the prop room as though he was putting himself under close arrest. The really extraordinary thing was that Miss Lipman should be a friend of Meredith’s mother.
Uncle Vernon was dozing in his chair when Stella came downstairs. His mouth hung open and he had taken out the bottom set of his dentures; they sat in the hearth, nudging the pom-pom of his slipper, the flames flickering across them in a smile.
‘I’m sorry to be a burden,’ she said. ‘I can’t help myself. Really, I think the world of you. I’ve cleaned the tide-mark and I’ve put the loofah back under the stairs.’ She knew that even if he heard he wouldn’t let on. Declarations, like rich food, upset him. She kissed the air above his head and scurried