The Solace of Sin Read online

  In the first months of crazy love, even in the first year of their marriage, she had taken his aggressive attitude towards his own people as a trait of strong character. She had been led, self-blindly, to think that his arrogance was but the outcome of constant struggle and striving to establish himself as a writer. When she found out that this trait stemmed from nothing more than a giant inferiority complex she had felt pity for him; and the pity, she knew, would have made her love grow but for this other thing, the other thing that had become like a disease with him, this thing that besmirched her and made her feel fouled from his touch.

  As she turned from the window to make for the refrigerator she realised she’d be sorry to leave this flat, and as she took out a tray of eight glasses containing a mixed fruit salad and considered the seven other homes she’d had during her nineteen years of married life she realised she’d had little feeling about leaving any one of them. But this flat was different. Perhaps it was the place itself. Perhaps it was because she had been more resigned during the last year. Perhaps it was because she knew she could now walk out tomorrow and it would have no adverse effect on Peter.

  There now surged up the thought that if she had walked out at any period in Peter’s life it would have made little difference to him, as long as she had taken him with her. It implied, as it always did, that she had stayed because she had wanted to stay, that she had stayed because she had hoped against hope that Jim would behave…and had he? At least he was more civil to her now. She would not listen to the voice that told her one had to be civil if one thought that by being otherwise one would lose one’s only means of support; instead, she told herself he was more settled: he no longer had the urge to get into the car and drive off without a word and not return for two or three days, sometimes even a week. His life was now set to a pattern: he worked in his study until lunchtime; then he took a long walk in the afternoon. He was very proud of his figure. At forty-four he had no surplus fat on him; his neck was thick, but it was muscular thickness, and his sandy hair showed no trace of thinning or greyness. He was careful of what he ate and even more careful of what he drank; except for the times when he would drink himself into a state of ugly viciousness. These bouts would usually precede a long absence from home, but the bouts too had now ceased. Twice a week he went to a club; sometimes he went to a theatre, although never with her. The evenings he was at home he shut himself in his study and worked. That was the pattern of this present life. She had fitted into it without demur, for the moment thankful for the respite. But this period of peace, if not already ended, would be shattered tonight when she told him that they could no longer continue living their present way of life and must give up this flat, and…that she was closing their joint account.

  She was tossing the salads when the bell rang, and as she went out of the kitchen the study door opened and her husband appeared on the small landing at the top of the steps, and from there he said, ‘That’ll be Harry. I’ll let them in.’

  It was as if he had been waiting for the bell to ring, she thought. And very likely he had; he always became tensed up before a meeting with Harry. It was different with Ben. He could patronise his older brother, but he couldn’t take such an attitude with his younger one. She hoped Harry wouldn’t be in an argumentative mood tonight, because she had been looking forward to Peter’s birthday tea—it couldn’t really be called a party.

  Jim Stapleton tugged at each cuff of his smart woollen jacket before he opened the door, and when he saw his brother Harry and his small dumpy wife standing there, he smiled widely at them. It was an attractive smile. Lighting up his heavy face, it stripped the years from him and placed him firmly in his early thirties.

  ‘Hello, Harry!’ he said quickly. ‘You got here then. Is the lift working? It was out of order all morning. That’s what you get in these places.’ He stood aside as he talked and allowed his brother and sister-in-law to enter the hall. ‘How are you, Millie? Here, give me your coat.’

  ‘Oh, fine, Jim.’

  ‘Oh, fine, Jim?’ Harry Stapleton cast an amused glance at his wife. ‘You had symptoms of rickets before we came out.’

  ‘Oh, give over, you!’ Millie pushed at her husband; then turning to Jim, who was hanging up her coat in the hall wardrobe, she said, ‘And he would have rickets if he had the work I have before me every day. He and Ada make the place look as if we’ve got a family of ten.’

  As yet the brothers hadn’t exchanged a greeting, and Harry Stapleton was walking towards Constance, where she stood in the lounge doorway. She was, as usual, leaving the ushering to her husband. He always liked playing the amiable host. That the mood rarely carried him through an evening was beside the point.

  ‘Hello, Connie.’

  ‘Hello, Harry.’

  Harry looked closely at his sister-in-law. His eyes level with hers, he asked bluntly, ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yes, I’m quite all right, Harry.’

  ‘The head?’ He tapped his brow.

  ‘Not a sign of a migraine for the past month.’

  ‘Oh, that’s fine. I’m glad to hear that.’ He nodded at her. Then looking round the room, he cried in a loud jocular tone, ‘Well, where’s tall, wide and handsome?’

  ‘Oh.’ Constance laughed at the description, which secretly pleased her. ‘He’ll be out in a minute, Harry; he’s just getting dressed. Sit down…where’s Ada? I thought she was coming with you.’

  It was Millie who answered. ‘She’ll be along shortly, Connie; after five, likely. She’s got a new job.’

  ‘Another?’ Jim had uttered the word unintentionally and he hastened to explain it immediately by adding, ‘What I mean is—’ But he got no further before his brother came back with, ‘I know what you mean. Well, she can change her job seven days a week if she wants to, and here’s one who’ll help her. If you have your fling early enough you’ll settle down; it’s those who are restricted who come a cropper later on. It’s been proved again and again.’

  Harry did not look at his brother as he spoke, and when he finished speaking he nodded towards his wife, and the nod said, That goes for you, too.

  Millie stared back at her husband for a moment. Then she looked up at Constance, and Constance looked back at her, and in the awkward silence, which tonight had presented itself particularly early on in the family meeting, Peter entered the room, and the atmosphere changed.

  Harry and Millie shook his hand warmly as they offered him birthday greetings, and Millie, who had been holding a small parcel, handed it to him, saying, ‘There you are, lad. It’s not much and likely you’ve got a better one, but anyway, that’s what we’ve got for you.’

  Peter fingered the parcel, then impulsively he kissed his aunt on the cheek. He liked his Aunt Millie. He liked her thick northern accent; it was warm and enfolding. His mother’s voice too was warm, but in a different way. There was an earthiness about his Aunt Millie that had a soothing effect on him. She was good, honest. That being so, why was their Ada such a bitch?

  ‘Go on; aren’t you going to open it?’

  He undid the brown paper to reveal a leather wallet and a matching key case; and sticking out of the wallet pocket was a pound note.

  ‘Oh, Aunt Millie.’ He bent forward and kissed her again, and she pushed him, saying, ‘Go on. Give over, an’ don’t pretend you’re floored by a pound note. We generally put a penny in for good luck, but we couldn’t give you a penny, could we?’

  He turned now to Harry and said quietly, ‘Thanks, Uncle Harry. I need them both, the wallet especially first’—he smiled broadly—‘but it’ll be some time before I’ll have a use for the keys, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, you never know. You never know, lad.’ Harry nodded at him.

  ‘Come and sit down beside me’—Millie patted the maroon plush couch—‘an’ tell me what else you got.’

  ‘Oh.’ Peter lowered his eyes for a moment. Then lifting them to Constance, he said, ‘Mother—’ His words were checked by her expression and he g
lanced towards his father, who was standing with his back to the wide window, and added, ‘and Father…they bought me a car.’

  ‘A car? But—’

  ‘It is only a second-hand one.’ Constance was nodding her head in small jerks at Harry.

  ‘But where are you going to keep another car with two already in the garage? Good God, another car!’ Harry finished on a high note.

  ‘Oh, I’ll keep it round the side of the block, Uncle. It won’t matter about it getting wet. It’s not a very grand one, but…but it’ll be mine. I wanted one of my own, you know.’

  ‘Three cars.’ Harry Stapleton looked at his brother, then at his nephew, and lastly at his sister-in-law, and he said flatly, ‘You’re daft, Connie. That’s what you are, clean plumb daft.’

  The remark could have been taken as either censorious or funny. Millie and Peter took the latter view and laughed; Jim, apparently, the former, for his face became tight as he stared at his brother. But Harry seemed not to notice. Drawing up a chair opposite Peter, he said, ‘Well now, I want to hear all about it. University: did you get fixed? What’s going to happen?’

  ‘Oh.’ Peter rubbed his chin with his hand before beginning, ‘Well, eventually I want to study microbiology. For now I have been advised to take a general degree in science, to include chemistry and biology.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Harry was nodding at him.

  ‘If I get it, I could go into industry, or the agricultural side of things, even medicine’—he smiled at Harry—‘for microbiologists are in demand in the National Health Service.’

  ‘You’ve made a good choice; you’re not going to be pinned down to one job for life.’ There was a note of bitterness in Harry’s voice.

  Harry had started in the pit at the age of fourteen and from the first day his one desire had been to get out of it. This he finally managed to do when he enlisted in the Army in 1943. At the end of the war he took a course while still in the Army, which brought him an educational certificate and enabled him to attend a teachers’ training college. Now he was a teacher. In those first days it didn’t matter that his pupils were the roughs and toughs of the slums of Newcastle. He was out of the mines, he was out of the Army, and he was teaching. He had a status. Moreover, he was the only one of his family that had achieved anything. At that time his elder brother Ben spent his days hacking up carcasses of meat; as for their Jim, he would neither work nor want; a writer, that’s what their Jim wanted to be, and in the meantime he managed to get by on an incompatibility with most jobs and the compensating factor of the dole. And then one day, it seemed overnight, their Jim had become a writer. He wrote a book about the very things that he, Harry, was thinking all the time, except the sex bits, and these weren’t bits, but great dollops. Jim had set his story on the Tyne, where he had grown up. He had made a backcloth of the river, with its gantry-lined banks, its ships, its factories and yards, its bridges; the fine huddle of bridges streaming upwards one above the other. He had made those bridges live, and he had used one of them as a climax to his story: the beaten man straddling its girders before taking his last leap into the river.

  Overnight his brother Jim had become a name. Within a month of the book being published Stanhope Street knew him no more. He moved to London, from where he sent his mother fifty pounds, and she had acted as if it were five thousand. Fifty pounds for keeping him for twenty-four years. The day they made a film of his book she threw a big party. They came from Barrack Road and Gallowgate in their dozens. They couldn’t get into the house, so she put a table in the street, and she put herself into debt she never got out of for years.

  Then his brother Jim had another stroke of luck. He married his publisher’s only daughter, although not, it was understood, to everybody’s satisfaction, particularly of the publisher himself. But Jim’s luck was in, for the publisher died within six months of his daughter being married, and now their Jim had a wealthy wife.

  Harry remembered the first time he had seen Connie. It was when Jim came down to their mother’s funeral. He could recall to this day the first glimpse he had of her as she stood by the side of his brother in the dingy front room. He had thought then that she resembled a racehorse harnessed to a dray cart, and subsequent years hadn’t altered his opinion.

  His train of thought was broken by Millie saying to Constance, ‘Are Ben and Susan coming?’ and Constance answering, ‘Yes, but not before six. He can’t get away from the shop before then.’

  ‘And I’ll lay ten pounds to a penny that they’ll be gone at seven. What do you bet?’ Harry was leaning towards Connie, a grin on his face now.

  ‘I wouldn’t take you on,’ said Constance, smiling back at him.

  ‘No, nor would anybody else,’ said Harry, dropping back against the couch. ‘That woman and her bingo; honest to God, it’s a disease. Our Ben says, she’s like a cat on hot bricks all day on a Sunday. Can you believe it?’ He looked round from one to the other. ‘The mentality of wanting to play bingo six nights a week!’

  ‘There are men who go to the races every day in the season, travelling hundreds of miles between the courses. There are women who play bridge every night…including Sundays.’ Jim sounded like a lecturer in philosophy explaining a social pattern to a group of young students, and the impression was carried further when he walked to a table and took a cigarette from a box and tapped it on the back of his hand before turning to them again and adding, ‘No-one should judge another man’s actions…or a woman’s, for that matter, until he has been in a similar situation and noted his own reactions to it. Susan goes to bingo because she finds an outlet in it; also, from what we gather, she has won a considerable sum over the past few years, so therefore—’

  ‘Oh my God! Leave over,’ said Harry, still not looking at his brother. ‘I take your meaning. All right, all right; look at it from a philosophical standpoint or from any point you like, but to me Susan is a lazy trollop. Well, perhaps not a trollop in that sense or Ben would kick her backside out of the house, but she’s a lazy cat and all she thinks about is bingo and clothes, and if she could only see herself in them as other people see her she would have a fit…Clothes, and getting out of the house, that’s Susan.’

  A long-drawn-out breath from Millie brought Harry’s eyes to her. Millie had a quirk to her lips, and she said to no-one in particular, ‘And good luck to her.’

  When Harry gave her a push that nearly knocked her off the end of the couch they all laughed, again all except Jim. He turned away and looked out of the window and down into the courtyard for a moment to give himself a chance to get a grip on his temper. His brother Harry had the power to get under his skin like nobody else. He always had the desire to slap him in his mouth, but Harry always managed to do the slapping first.

  Jim considered himself a good talker, an interesting talker. When he got going he could hold people’s attention, all except their Harry’s…and, of course, his own family’s. Oh yes, his own family’s. They didn’t want to listen to him, either of them. He turned to see Harry standing by Constance’s side. His brother was laughing as he explained something to her, and the sight of her looking happy, even carefree, gave him a feeling that held the bitterness of gall. She liked their Harry, she always had. She even admired him, this schoolteacher at Westgate Road School, he with the stamp of Stanhope Street still on him; a lovely combination. His accent had never changed and he was teaching children, and he dared, he dared to talk down to him, to shut him up. He asked himself now why he had ever come back to this quarter. Why? It hadn’t made the slightest difference to his writing.

  In those first few months when he had dashed that book off, he had thought perhaps it had. But where had that got him? Nowhere. He was more dry now than when he had been in London, and if it wasn’t for one thing he’d go back tomorrow.

  As his eyes roamed slowly around the room, he had to add another reason to that which at present kept him in the north: every article in the room spelt money…and taste. A man got used to certai
n comforts; they crept insidiously into his life, until they seemed not to have any value until he was faced with doing without them. He had lived graciously, one could say, for twenty years and he was less inclined to give it up as the years went on. As one grew older the needs of the body didn’t change except to become more demanding, and the price he had to pay for satisfying these needs became greater. In his case it meant cultivating a civil tongue—a difficult accomplishment when you wanted to spit venom—and he knew that before tonight was over he’d be called upon to use all his control, because this morning she had received her bank statement, and it was only because she wanted her young lordship’s party to go off smoothly that there hadn’t already been a showdown.

  He moved to where she was standing and put his hand on her shoulder, something he hadn’t done for a long time, so long that he couldn’t really remember the occasion, and when he felt no stiffening or shrinking from his touch he bent his head forward and said, ‘What about a drink? And you, Harry, what’ll you have?’

  ‘Oh no, not for me,’ said Harry. ‘It’s too early in the day for that. What I’m dying for this minute is a cup of tea.’

  ‘I’ll make one.’ Constance moved smoothly away from Jim’s grasp. ‘It won’t take me a minute.’

  ‘I’ll give you a hand, Connie.’ Millie rose from the couch and followed Constance across the hall and into the kitchen, but once there she did not set the tray or help in any way; instead, she walked to the window and stood looking out, and after a moment she said, ‘I’ve always thought this is a fine view, Connie.’

  ‘Yes, Millie; it’s a lovely view.’

  How often had Millie remarked on this particular view during the last year, Constance wondered, as she placed five cups on a tray. After taking a silver teapot from another tray already set on a side table, she scooped five teaspoons full of tea into the pot before pouring in the boiling water. Then she looked at Millie’s back and asked quietly, ‘What is it, Millie?’