Betrayed
What do you tell your wife when you’ve been laid off. They had suspected it was coming but not with this sudden ferocity. As one of the technocratic elite he had thought that he was above such things. But it wasn’t just his bruised ego, Merthyr was a one industry town as it had been in the thirties; then mining – now washing machines. There was nothing else. He emptied the dregs of his fourth pint and became maudlin.
Where the hell was he, it wasn’t like him to be late. He couldn’t be working over they’d been on short time for months now. Well what with the kids screaming like the little beasts they were and Dada moaning like the child he was she was not going to postpone eating any longer. All afternoon to prepare a decent hot meal when the kids would just as well have beans on toast. Dada enjoyed it though.
He must arrive soon or the foundations would start to rumble. He was the stabiliser, the rock. His presence was the catalyst that fused all their random elements together. Without him they were in constant warring conflict. Each day about now she was at her wits end and it was only the comfort of his nearness that lent her back her sanity. An accident. Another woman. The latter was the worse.
Kids abed, Dada a pub before her husband came staggering across the doorstep. She had hardly ever seen him drunk, merely happy, as if the world was miraculously transformed into a sunny garden. He would bounce the children on his knees and sing them nonsense songs composed ad lib out of his inebriation. Tonight he was drunk.
He burned the tip of his tongue on the hot spoiled remains of his dinner. Whatever it was he had to say simmering until he could contain it no longer engendering in her a cold terror. It was another woman – one of those stupid young miniskirted minxes at the factory. The reality was a reprieve from the imagined infidelity and she sighed with relief. Susie was almost glad. She was glad. Wasn’t this the new orthodoxy, mobility of labour? In the Common Market there were loads of jobs……. in Germany.
He wasn’t in the mood for her political wit, mistook it for mockery. She was the one with the Science Degree. He cried silently, inwardly.
It wasn’t as if the manufacture of washing machines was the most ennobling of occupations. She hadn’t really meant to say that, it slipped out. There are better jobs to be had.
Not round here girl, not round here.
Coventry. From the reaction you’d think it was a million miles away, another country, another culture, alien. Anyway it was the only decent offer in a month. Nothing round here. Hadn’t he told her. Wales was dead, harpooned by English capitalists. Ha what a pun. They had to go. Coventry; the Cathedral, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland. Here; Cardiff Castle twenty two miles or two and a half hours by rail or road. Panto at the New Theatre, a Seurat and a couple of Monets.
Roots, roots. A culture of sorts. Welsh sea, weak beer, pride, identity. The old man would have to come with them. Couldn’t stay here alone. The house sold, his house, he’d sold it to them for a song. Not worth much more than a song really. Little terraced house with a red brick lean-to extension. In Coventry they’d need every penny. Ninety percent mortgage on a little box made of ticky tacky. Yes they would have to sell the house, the old man would have to come. But he wouldn’t.
He simply sat staring at the four walls of the little kitchen as at the face of a lover he was soon to lose. The best part of his life had been lived in this snug ugly little den. The depression the only previous forced separation. An antagonistic flirtation with England and the English. Slough, Bunyan’s despond. And that was as much of it as he ever wanted to have. Slough, Coventry, they were one and the same in his book, a refuge for the unemployed.
So the journey to Coventry was a painful one. Crying kids, angry wife, recalcitrant old man. And each rhythmic fusillade on the slippery ribbon stretching on a rack one more umbilical cord, taut, until it snapped. Moving away, moving away, moving away from his true and essential self.
Never having been in digs before or even B&B he had nothing with which to compare the functional bedraggled bed-sit in which he found himself. Threadbare rugs and brown utilitarian auction lot furniture. The wobbly bum which he followed upstairs did not evoke the archetypal landlady but her name, Mrs Gladstone, did. Blonde, brassy, curvy with a wickedly sly come hither. He hadn’t had another woman since his marriage. Fancy he had, and chance might have been a fine thing, proper improper circumstance, and now…..
Her husband Jack was the simple exploitable, exploited type, hardworking, decent and honest, some years her senior, a doter, and a shift worker to boot. But the first nightshift came and went, and the second, third, fourth and fifth. What had he expected, a tap tapping on the midnight door, a breast revealing flimsy nightie, a plea to fix her ailing percolator. Well that was the way it always happened on the telly. Should he really have been that naïve. The weekend came. Reluctantly he went home.
Home was hell. She was stiffly starchly angry and any suggestion of sexual contact rudely rejected. The kids were getting her down, the old man was permanently drunk, nobody wanted the house at the price they were asking, he was expecting too much of her and she couldn’t cope. They fought and called each other names and made absurd insupportable accusations, but because she was half right he imagined he must be too. The old man wouldn’t listen to reason and the kids ill behaved in their insecurity. Parting was not a sweet sorrow, the umbilical pain more bearable.
At Coventry he was treated as one of the family. They had discovered a common interest, the theatre. Their knowledge was negligible, the interest derived from a peculiar snobbery. But interest it was nonetheless and no less genuine for all its pretentiousness. Consequently he was regularly invited into the lower rooms of the house which was their living accommodation, to watch immaculate BBC2 productions.
Samantha waited impatiently as Susie splashed in the lean-to bathroom. Of course Dada could take care of the kids. It was unthinkable that her own sister would miss Rod’s promotion party. It wasn’t every day that one got offered a seat on the board now was it, and what a pity Tom hadn’t taken Rod’s offer of a job five years ago, they wouldn’t be in this pickle now would they?
So he had turned them both down Susie smiled through the soapsuds, and wasn’t she glad, otherwise their roles might have been reversed. She was welcome to it all, that pretentious lifestyle. Sam had tried hard enough to get her talons into Tom. It had always been that sort of sisterly relationship, always coveting what Susie had even as a child.
By the time they arrived at Sam’s new detached in one and a half acres most of the guests had already arrived and Sam was seething. A gaggle of shallow sophisticates all quacking out of tune and in a minor key. Three young couples, invited for the purpose gyrating without passion or rhythm to insipid background music, smiling without conviction.
“Ah my favourite most lovely sister in law”, Rod called too loudly. She avoided him deliberately holding out her arms to a hunky blonde stud.
“I owe Stevie the first dance.” Immediately regretting the public rebuff. Stevie, who was at all these soirees danced like a drunken sailor. Where the hell did Sam get these effete people from, did she send for them by mail order, two dozen chic party fillers.
Why did Susie always put him down, Rod fumed inwardly, never taking him seriously, she knew he lusted her to distraction. But he had plans for Susie involving specially prepared cocktails.
Several slammers later and she was dancing on a revolving cloud. She rode the ‘elevator’ to the bedroom and fell in a flock of feathers, rolling down the dark corridor of oblivion. Only the occasional shrill call of sea birds and ephemeral shafts of light made any inroads into her sensibilities. Rod’s face loomed and laughed like a rolling barrel in a sheet of orange flame. The laugh exploded and the flame subsumed her.
In Coventry a flame lit in Tom’s loins filling him with dread and remorse. Now there was no escape back into the comfort of fantasy. Jack’s departure for work was the alchemy which catalysed his lust into reality. He watched incredulously her own metamorphosis, slightly ludicrous. Wasn’t it after all ineluctable, wasn’t there the stuff of dreams about it.
The stuff of his wife’s dreams was wet, watery sterile seed, sweat and vomit. But yes, yes, yes she had savoured her dream, her wretched condition absolving her of all responsibility for it, but frustrated in her wretchedness at his more culpable and certain faraway infidelity – a woman knows. And after death: the judgement. The flushing away of watery seed and urine with a sober terror, all reality, no fantasy, nothing imagined, scrubbing frantically with soap that which only blood will purge.
Hammering on the bedroom door. “It’s the police Suse.” Was she being arrested then for this, her mind still fuddled. It was all absurdity, inexplicable hot tears coursing down her cheeks. “It’s alright, he’ll be alright. Rod will drive you over.” Oh no he wont. “Splash some water on your face.”
In Coventry the hot desert of her expert bed still left him with a thirst and repentant in the certainty of Susie’s fidelity. “It’s bad news sir I’m afraid,” the policeman standing as if to attention in the open door, he half dressed on the stair, she dishabille behind the open door his second seed still warm between her thighs.” It’s your father sir.”
Guilt dripped like black congealing blood from the bare branches of the gnarled wet Cefn Cemetery trees. They had no words with which to console each other and each so desperate for the other’s consolation.
He went back to Coventry to drown himself in her, but she was dry.
The weather broke with promise of Spring. Susie came up and they moved into the new house. The sun shone. A balmier air prevailed. He confessed for the absolution of his tormented soul and she gave it joyfully, for the equality of the guilt produced, did it not, a balance, a parity. But having been forgiven he could not forgive, though she was surely blameless. He sent her reeling across the new bright room. Crimson spots from her split lip. Outside the children laughed on the small lawn. He proffered his own cheek. “Hit me hard,” his eyes wet with shame and hatred, “then neither of us will feel the pain.”
updated by @vivian-protheroe: 02/12/16 11:52:26PM
