In Between the Sheets (11 page)

“I’ve been doing it for ages.”

“You said half an hour for my birthday. You promised.” Charmian began again. Miranda, sighing as one
who only receives her due, sank her mouth into the pillow. Outside the room the traffic droned soothingly, the pitch of an ambulance siren rose and fell, a bird began to sing, broke off, started again, a bell rang somewhere downstairs and later a voice called out, over and over again, another siren passed, this time more distant… it was all so remote from the aquatic gloom where time had stopped, where Charmian gently drew her nails across her friend’s back for her birthday. The voice reached them again. Miranda stirred and said, “I think that’s my mum calling me. My dad must’ve come.”

When he rang the front doorbell of this house where he had lived sixteen years, Stephen assumed his daughter would answer. She usually did. But it was his wife. She had the advantage of three concrete steps and she glared down at him, waiting for him to speak. He had nothing ready for her.

“Is … is Miranda there?” he said finally. “I’m a little late,” he added, and taking his chance, advanced up the steps. At the very last moment she stepped aside and opened the door wider.

“She’s upstairs,” she said tonelessly as Stephen tried to squeeze by without touching her. “We’ll go in the big room.” Stephen followed her into the comfortable, unchanging room, lined from floor to ceiling with books he had left behind. In one corner, under its canvas cover, was his grand piano. Stephen ran his hand along its curving edge. Indicating the books he said, “I must take all these off your hands.”

“In your own good time,” she said as she poured sherry for him. “There’s no hurry.” Stephen sat down at the piano and lifted the cover. “Do either of you play it now?”

She crossed the room with his glass and stood behind him. “I never have the time. And Miranda isn’t interested now.”

He spread his hands over a soft, spacious chord, sustained it with the pedal and listened to it die away.

“Still in tune then?”

“Yes.” He played more chords, he began to improvise a melody, almost a melody. He could happily forget what he had come for and be left alone to play for an hour or so, his piano. “I haven’t played for over a year,” he said by way of explanation.

His wife was over by the door now about to call out to Miranda, and she had to snatch back her breath to say, “Really? It sounds fine to me. Miranda,” she called, “Miranda, Miranda,” rising and falling on three notes, the third note higher than the first, and trailing away inquisitively. Stephen played the three-note tune back, and his wife broke off abruptly. She looked sharply in his direction. “Very clever.”

“You know you have a musical voice,” said Stephen without irony.

She advanced farther into the room. “Are you still intending to ask Miranda to stay with you?”

Stephen closed the piano and resigned himself to hostilities. “Have you been working on her then?”

She folded her arms. “She won’t go with you. Not alone anyway.”

“There isn’t room in the flat for you as well.”

“And thank God there isn’t.”

Stephen stood up and raised his hand like an Indian chief. “Let’s not,” he said. “Let’s not.” She nodded and returned to the door and called out to their daughter in a steady tone, immune to imitation. Then she said quietly, “I’m talking about Charmian. Miranda’s friend.”

“What’s she like?”

She hesitated. “She’s upstairs. You’ll see her.”

“Ah…”

They sat in silence. From upstairs Stephen heard giggling, the familiar, distant hiss of the plumbing, a bedroom door opening and closing. From his shelves he picked out a book about dreams and thumbed through it. He was aware of his wife leaving the room, but he did not look up. The setting afternoon sun lit the room. “An emission during a dream indicates the sexual nature of the whole dream, however obscure and unlikely the contents are. Dreams culminating in emission may reveal the object of the dreamer’s desire as well as his inner conflicts. An orgasm cannot lie.”

“Hello Daddy,” said Miranda. “This is Charmian, my friend.” The light was in his eyes and at first he thought they held hands, like mother and child side by side before him, illuminated from behind by the orange dying sun, waiting to be greeted. Their recent laughter seemed concealed in their silence. Stephen stood up and embraced his daughter. She felt different to the touch, stronger perhaps. She smelled unfamiliar, she had a private life at last, accountable to no one. Her bare arms were very warm.

“Happy birthday,” Stephen said, closing his eyes as he squeezed her and preparing to greet the minute figure at her side. He stepped back smiling and virtually knelt before her on the carpet to shake hands, this doll-like figurine who stood no more than 3 foot 6 at his daughter’s side, whose wooden, oversized face smiled steadily back at him.

“I’ve read one of your books” was her calm first remark. Stephen sat back in his chair. The two girls still stood before him as though they wished to be described
and compared. Miranda’s T-shirt did not reach her waist by several inches and her growing breasts lifted the edge of the shirt clear of her belly. Her hand rested on her friend’s shoulder protectively.

“Really?” said Stephen after some pause. “Which one?”

“The one about evolution.”

“Ah …” Stephen took from his pocket the envelope containing the record gift certificate and gave it to Miranda. “It’s not much,” he said, remembering the bag full of gifts. Miranda retired to a chair to open her envelope. The dwarf however remained standing in front of him, regarding him fixedly. She fingered the hem of her child’s dress.

“Miranda told me a lot about you,” she said politely.

Miranda looked up and giggled. “No, I didn’t,” she protested.

Charmian went on. “She’s very proud of you.” Miranda blushed. Stephen wondered at Charmian’s age.

“I haven’t given her much reason to be,” he found himself saying, and gestured at the room to indicate the nature of his domestic situation. The tiny girl gazed patiently into his eyes and he felt for a moment poised on the edge of total confession. I never satisfied my wife in marriage, you see. Her orgasms terrified me.

Miranda had discovered her present. With a little cry she left her chair, cradled his head between her hands and stooping down kissed his ear.

“Thank you,” she murmured hotly and loudly, “thank you, thank you.” Charmian took a couple of paces nearer till she was almost standing between his open knees. Miranda settled on the arm of his chair. It grew darker.

He felt the warmth of Miranda’s body on his neck. She slipped down a little farther and rested her head on his shoulder. Charmian stirred. Miranda said, “I’m glad you came,” and drew her knees up to make herself smaller. From outside Stephen heard his wife moving from one room to another. He lifted his arm around his daughter’s shoulder, careful not to touch her breasts, and hugged her to him.

“Are you coming to stay with me when the holidays begin?”

“Charmian too …” She spoke childishly, but her words were delicately pitched between inquiry and stipulation.

“Charmian too,” Stephen agreed. “If she wants to.” Charmian let her gaze drop and said demurely, “Thank you.”

During the following week Stephen made preparations. He swept the floor of his only spare room, he cleaned the windows there and hung new curtains. He rented a television. In the mornings he worked with customary numbness and entered his achievements in the ledger book. He brought himself at last to set out what he could remember of his dream. The details seemed to be accumulating satisfactorily. His wife was in the café. It was for her that he was buying coffee. A young girl took a cup and held it to the machine. But now
he
was the machine, now
he
filled the cup. This sequence, laid out neatly, cryptically in his journal, worried him less now. It had, as far as he was concerned, a certain literary potential. It needed fleshing out, and since he could remember no more he would have to invent the rest. He thought of Charmian, of how small she was, and he examined carefully
the chairs ranged around the dining-room table. She was small enough for a baby’s high chair. In a department store he carefully chose two cushions. The impulse to buy the girls presents he distrusted and resisted. But still he wanted to do things for them. What could he do? He raked out gobs of ancient filth from under the kitchen sink, poured dead flies and spiders from the lamp fixtures, boiled fetid dishcloths; he bought a toilet brush and scrubbed the crusty bowl. Things they would never notice. Had he really become such an old fool? He spoke to his wife on the phone.

“You never mentioned Charmian before.”

“No,” she agreed. “It’s a fairly recent thing.”

“Well…” he struggled, “how do you feel about it?”

“It’s fine by me,” she said, very relaxed. “They’re good friends.” She was trying him out, he thought. She hated him for his fearfulness, his passivity and for all the wasted hours between the sheets. It had taken her many years of marriage to say so. The experimentation in his writing, the lack of it in his life. She hated him. And now she had a lover, a vigorous lover. And still he wanted to say, Is it right, our lovely daughter with a friend who belongs by rights in a circus or a silk-hung brothel serving tea? Our flaxen-haired, perfectly formed daughter, our tender bud, is it not perverse?

“Expect them Thursday evening,” said his wife by way of goodbye.

When Stephen answered the door he saw only Charmian at first, and then he made out Miranda outside the tight circle of light from the hall, struggling with both sets of luggage. Charmian stood with her hands on her hips, her heavy head tipped slightly to one side. Without
greeting she said, “We had to take a taxi and he’s downstairs waiting.”

Stephen kissed his daughter, helped her in with the cases and went downstairs to pay the taxi. When he returned, a little out of breath from the two flights of stairs, the front door of his flat was closed. He knocked and had to wait. It was Charmian who opened the door and stood in his path.

“You can’t come in,” she said solemnly. “You’ll have to come back later,” and she made as if to close the door. Laughing in his nasal, unconvincing way, Stephen lunged forwards, caught her under her arms and scooped her into the air. At the same time he stepped into the flat and closed the door behind him with his foot. He meant to lift her high in the air like a child, but she was heavy, heavy like an adult, and her feet trailed a few inches above the ground, it was all he could manage. She thumped his hand with her fists and shouted.

“Put me…” Her last word was cut off by the crash of the door. Stephen released her instantly. “… down,” she said softly.

They stood in the bright hallway, both a little out of breath. For the first time he saw Charmian’s face clearly. Her head was bullet shaped and ponderous, her lower lip curled permanently outwards and she had the beginnings of a double chin. Her nose was squat and she had the faint downy grayness of a moustache. Her neck was thick and bullish. Her eyes were large and calm, set far apart, brown like a dog’s. She was not ugly, not with those eyes. Miranda was at the far end of the long hall. She wore ready-faded jeans and a yellow shirt. Her hair was in plaits and tied at the ends with scraps of blue denim. She came and stood by her friend’s side.

“Charmian doesn’t like being lifted about,” she explained. Stephen guided them towards his sitting room.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Charmian and laid his hand on her shoulder for an instant. “I didn’t know that.”

“I was only joking when I came to the door,” she said evenly.

“Yes of course,” Stephen said hurriedly. “I didn’t think anything else.”

During dinner, which Stephen had bought ready-cooked from a local Italian restaurant, the girls talked to him about their school. He allowed them a little wine and they giggled a lot and clutched at each other when they fell about. They prompted each other through a story about their headmaster who looked up girls’ skirts. He remembered some anecdotes of his own time at school, or perhaps they were other people’s time, but he told them well and they laughed delightedly. They became very excited. They pleaded for more wine. He told them one glass was enough.

Charmian and Miranda said they wanted to do the dishes. Stephen sprawled in an armchair with a large brandy, soothed by the blur of their voices and the homely clatter of dishes. This was where he lived, this was his home. Miranda brought him coffee. She set it down on the table with the mock deference of a waitress.

“Coffee, sir?” she said. Stephen moved over in his chair and she sat in close beside him. She moved easily between woman and child. She drew her legs up as before and pressed herself against her large shaggy father. She had unloosened her plaits and her hair spread across Stephen’s chest, golden in the electric light.

“Have you found a boyfriend at school?” he asked.

She shook her head and kept it pressed against his shoulder.

“Can’t find a boyfriend, eh?” Stephen insisted. She sat up suddenly and lifted her hair clear of her face.

“There are loads of boys,” she said angrily, “loads of them, but they’re so
stupid
, they’re such show-offs.” Never before had the resemblance between his wife and daughter seemed so strong. She glared at him. She included him with the boys at school. “They’re always doing things.”

“What sort of things?”

She shook her head impatiently. “I don’t know… the way they comb their hair and bend their knees.”

“Bend their knees?”

“Yes. When they think you’re watching them. They stand in front of our window and pretend they’re combing their hair when they’re just looking in at us, showing off. Like this.” She sprang out of the chair and crouched in the center of the room in front of an imaginary mirror, bent low like a singer over a microphone, her head tilted grotesquely, combing with long, elaborate strokes; she stepped back, preened and then combed again. It was a furious imitation. Charmian was watching it too. She stood in the doorway with coffee in each hand.

“What about you, Charmian,” Stephen said carelessly, “do you have a boyfriend?” Charmian set the coffee cups down and said, “Of course I don’t,” and then looked up and smiled at them both with the tolerance of a wise old woman.