An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [15]
Vernon waited until Stella’s door closed before leaving his chair. He considered whether he should go upstairs to take down the blanket or leave it until the morning. He didn’t think Stella would have remembered, not being the one to pay the bills. Come daybreak the lodgers would be burrowing in and out of the bathroom like ferrets, burning the electricity with abandon when they found the place in darkness. The poor wretch with the sewn-back eyelids would spot the difference, being in a state of perpetual light, but his sleeping habits were so irregular that by the time he surfaced from his nightmares the meter would have run up a tidy penny.
Rubbing his back, Vernon limped to the window. Above him he could see the outline of the railings and the black smudge of a wallflower thrusting through the cracks of the basement bricks. A man walked past, the steel tips to his boots striking the pavement. He was trailed by a frisky dog who stopped and cocked a dancing leg in the lamplight to let fly droplets of dazzling urine. ‘Bugger off,’ shouted Vernon, thumping the window with his fist.
He felt out of sorts. Stella had worked for no more than three weeks, and already she was changing. For five days she had refused to let Lily come near her with the curling tongs, and several times she had left the food uneaten on her plate. She hadn’t shown insolence; she simply told them she wasn’t hungry, and that she thought it was high time she chose for herself whether to crimp her hair or leave it as God made it. Lily said she had a point, on both counts.
The girl was less argumentative all round, with the exception of tonight, and that had been his fault for setting up such opposition. He had wanted her to alter, had himself at some sacrifice to his pocket jostled her onto the path towards advancement, and yet he sensed she was leaving him behind. He hadn’t realised how bereft he would feel, how alarmed.
There was more to baths, he thought uneasily, than cleanliness.
4
Meredith made a telephone call both before and after breakfast in the lobby of the Commercial Hotel where he lodged. On the second occasion the wife of his landlord caught him thumping the side of the machine with his fist. ‘Has button B stuck, Mr Potter?’ she asked, and he murmured something unintelligible at her over his shoulder as he pushed into the revolving doors and spun out into the street.
Next door to the hotel was a garden laid out in memory of some worthy citizen of an earlier century, its beds planted with roses pruned brutally to the soil. The municipal railings had been taken away for the war effort and through the gaps in the makeshift fence of galvanised iron he saw a tramp in an army greatcoat sitting on a green bench. The tramp looked up and glared maliciously back; he was sucking on a chicken bone and the stubble of his beard glistened.
‘It’s all right,’ said Meredith. ‘I was merely admiring the garden. Such an oasis of peace in all these bricks.’ And he walked on in the winter sunshine, the tom-cat smell of the tramp in his nostrils, the wind swelling his clothes, bowling him down the hill towards the station.
He began to recite an act of resignation to the Divine Will. O, Lord my God, I now at this moment, readily and willingly accept at Thy Hand whatever kind of death . . . and checked himself in time, knowing his intention was unworthy. He was neither willing nor ready to die, not until he had strangled Hilary.
He had his suede shoes brushed over with a wire brush by the boot-black outside the General Post Office and arrived at Exchange station a few minutes before ten o’clock. Entering the railway hotel he ordered a pot of coffee and sat in the main lounge with his back to the stairs. His head was full of sentences he was going to write to Hilary when he had the time to put pen to paper: I may remind you