Injury Time - Beryl Bainbridge [52]
I was raped not so long ago, she could have told him, and I hardly remember that.
‘But I’d like to be with you,’ Edward said. ‘It would be fun.’ He was staring at her full in the face. For once he didn’t notice the blotches on her cheeks, the state of her hair. He needed someone.
‘What about your garden?’ she reminded him. ‘You couldn’t leave your roses. Imagine all those little insects and things burrowing into the buds and nobody there to spray them.’
‘I often think I want the roses,’ he said, ‘because I had them as a child. I wake in the night thinking about that garden. I sit at the window and watch the sun rise and imagine my father walking through the dew with his gun under his arm.’ He rubbed his eyes as though tired of searching for that solitary figure in gum boots. ‘They’re my father’s roses,’ he said. ‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘You should rest,’ Binny said.
‘I don’t need to rest,’ he protested. ‘I can’t. Everything’s so real now. It’s all so real.’
She gathered he meant the presence of the gunmen, the disordered room, their imprisonment. For the life of her, she couldn’t understand him – to her it was like a dream.
‘Think of it this way,’ she said. ‘It all equals out. Take Simpson and Muriel. They’re together and yet they’re not. We’re not together and yet we are.’ She touched his wrinkled cheek.
‘I feel dreadful about poor Simpson,’ he said. ‘Simply dreadful. I should have watched him more carefully. I don’t think we should blame Muriel too much. She’s pretty highly strung, you know, and he doesn’t confide in her as he ought.’
‘She’s highly something,’ said Binny. She looked at Muriel sitting composedly in the armchair by the hearth, genteelly sipping her tea. Though for some reason she’d screamed at the sight of the doll, she hadn’t made a sound when her husband entered covered in blood.
‘He’s in serious financial difficulties,’ Edward said. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, but he’s terribly overdrawn at the bank—’
‘He’s over what?’ Binny asked. She put her arms about Edward’s neck and asked again. ‘He’s what?’
‘Shh,’ said Edward. He peeped over her shoulder. Simpson was lying with his good ear to the cloth, face turned to the back window. ‘His business isn’t going too well. He complains when Muriel goes to the hairdresser and so forth, but he never confides in her. I think it’s frightfully wrong of him.’
‘Does he tell her about his women?’ asked Binny. ‘Does she know about the VD?’
‘Good Lord, no,’ said Edward, shocked.
Binny wrenched her arms from his neck and glared at him. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘He should tell her about his money problems, shouldn’t he? He ought to worry her silly over the bills and the mortgage, but he should keep his extramarital affairs to himself. Share his burdens but not his pleasures. You make me sick.’ She sprang to her feet and flounced through to the kitchen.
Ginger was leaning against the draining board. She shoved him out of the way and began noisily to slide the dishes into the sink.
18
Ginger switched on the wireless at midday to listen to the news.
‘Don’t touch it,’ warned Binny. ‘It won’t go at all if you move it.’ The wireless was old and there was a lot of interference. Alma said it was like being in the underground, crowding round an illegal transmitter, waiting to hear Churchill’s voice.
‘Illegal?’ questioned Edward. ‘In the tube station?’
‘Shh,’ said Simpson, endeavouring to listen with one ear.
There was a report of an air disaster somewhere in Latin America and a fire in New York. Nearer home an MP had died and the two grandchildren of a bank manager in Camden had been held to ransom for seven hours while thieves coolly cashed cheques totalling thousands of pounds.
‘Why do they always say “coolly”?’ said Alma. ‘It’s so silly. I bet they don’t feel cool at all.’
‘I can’t hear,’ complained Simpson. It was giving him a headache trying to make sense of the newsreader’s words. He