Reginald Hill: A clubbable woman

'Don't you want any tea, Dave?'

Fernie's brawny arm held his wife in a clamp-like grip round the waist. He looked thoughtfully into her face, then pressed gently with his free hand where it rested on her leg just above the knee.

'No,' he said, 'I think I've changed my mind again.'

Jenny Connon hadn't quite made up her mind what to do about the hand on her knee. Adaptability was an important quality in a teacher, her education tutor had told the class that morning. How to cope with the unexpected. Though, as she herself had arranged that her roommate should go out and she herself had turned the key in the door to prevent interruption, the situation was not all that unexpected.

'Do you really want to be a teacher?' she asked brightly.

Antony (he insisted on the full name) pushed the hair back from his brow with a gesture almost girlish (but he used the hand not on her knee) and smiled. 'If you mean, have I got a sense of vocation, no. If you mean, are my natural inclinations to be something else being repressed, the answer is equally no. Being at college is less distasteful than most of the alternatives, and it pleased my parents. Anyway, think of the holidays. I have a sense of vacation very strongly developed.' Antony Wilkes was without doubt the smoothest man in the South Warwickshire College of Education at the moment. As he was in his third year and Jenny was in her first, the opportunities for the relationship to develop were limited. As it was, Jenny had decided to feel flattered that she was the second girl he had chosen from the year's new supply. Her college 'mother' in the second year had assured her (rather sadly) that Antony was most discriminating in his selection. Her room-mate had been even more positive. She had been the first of the year. This gave Jenny the advantage of being well briefed in the Wilkesian technique, but being forewarned she was discovering did not prevent her from being disarmed. Antony was one of the few people she had met who really did talk in long well-organized speeches like people in plays. Most of her acquaintance, she realized, hardly ever strung together more than a couple of dozen words at a time except when telling an anecdote, and in fact the few who did talk at length were down in the catalogue as bores and therefore to be avoided. But Antony talked eloquently, interestingly, without strain; with none of those changes of direction, grammatical substitutions, syntactical complexities, whose existence her linguistic lecturer assured her was the real framework of the spoken language. His speech, Jenny decided, was the smooth, reassuring surface of his amatory technique. Even the slight sense of staginess it conveyed worked for him, creating a faintly non-real, therefore non-dangerous, context. But beneath the surface… The obvious survival tactic was to stay afloat. She seized at a bit of driftwood in his last speech.

'Is it important to please your parents?'

'But of course. It's important to please everyone who deserves it, even a little beyond desert if possible. Financially it's not important. My father has a strict scale of values. He gave me the precise amount necessary to bring my grant up to the level he has worked out to be sufficient for my well-being. Less would be neglect; more would be luxury. So I never get more or less for any reason. And to use money as punishment or reward is quite out of the question.'

'He sounds like a Puritan banker.'

'Not at all. If you wish to combine his religion with his profession, you'd have to call him an Aston Villa butcher. Mind you, my mother slips me the odd note now and then. But, as I say, this has nothing to do with the question. The only real answer is that, despite the fact that in many ways they find me utterly incomprehensible, they have always felt inclined by nature to please me; similarly I them.' 'You mean you love them?' asked Jenny, halfconsciously trying to embarrass him. 'Yes, of course. Had I not made that clear? I'm sorry. And you, do you love your parents?' 'Yes, I think so. My father, I like him a lot and we mean a lot to each other. It's a matter of talking and understanding, but my mother's different. Irritating in so many things. I want to scream at her sometimes.'

'But you never do?'

Jenny grinned. She had tried to stop grinning. She thought it made her face fall apart in the middle, and she still had to count her teeth to assure herself she had not got twice as many as other people. But she kept on forgetting.

Antony Wilkes was glad she forgot.

'Oh, sometimes. I give a quick forty-second-psychoanalysis. Rather nasty stuff it can be. She's a bit of a snob; uses me to get at Dad, whom she resents in some odd way. She's a few years older than he is, though I only use that as a last resort. I don't know why, I suppose I just know that for her age is the ultimate insult, stuck a long way after vanity and dishonesty! But sometimes I feel I'm a lot more like her than Dad, than I'm like Dad I mean, though I like him more.' Ruefully she compared her own performance as a speech-maker with Antony's. Still, it wasn't all that bad. And her hesitancies arose from uncertainties of emotion. Perhaps it would have flowed more smoothly if she hadn't been so aware of the tensions, the fight for survival at home. Antony's hand patted her knee sympathetically. She realized that her attempt to stop on the surface had somehow gone wrong. She had entered into a conversational intimacy with him without even noticing it. She would have to keep very much on the alert now. His other hand was pressing her shoulders round. She turned to him and he kissed her. She'd have to do something about his other hand. But not yet. Mini-skirts and tights, she thought dreamily. Action and reaction. The invitation to attack might be more compelling than ever before, but the defences were stronger. She grinned again, which produced a very invigorating kind of kiss. She could postpone her decision for a while yet. 'Christ, Marcus, where the hell have you been? You just said half-an-hour. It's been more like an hour and a half.' Marcus Felstead manoeuvred his bulk under the flap into the bar. 'Sorry, Ted, old son. Got held up a bit. Look, have a pint on me and push off now. I'll spell you when you've got a Saturday.' 'OK. And I'll have that pint. I've been so bloody busy that not a drop's passed my lips since you left.' 'It'll do you good. Give you an edge when they start fighting for the spare.' 'Some hope. There won't be much of that around now. See you, Marcus, Sid.' Sid Hope, the club treasurer, looked askance at Marcus.

'Nice of you to come back and give us a hand.'

'Come off it, Sid. I did get Ted to stand in.' 'Ted! Have you seen him at the till? He's got some peculiar decimal system of his own. Where have you been to anyway? On the prowl?'

'Nowhere important. Just out.'

A peal of uninhibited female laughter cut through the noise and fume of the bar. Marcus turned. Sitting in the furthermost corner surrounded by half a dozen men was the woman he expected to see after hearing that laugh. Dressed in a low-cut cocktail dress whose demure whiteness set off the gleaming black of her hair and the shining silver of her tights, she was looking up and smiling at the young man who bent over her, obviously telling a story. The treasurer followed Marcus's gaze and shook his head.

'Trouble,' he said laconically.

'What do you mean?' 'You know what Arthur is. He's been hopping around like a cat on hot bricks all evening waiting for his precious wife to turn up. Finally off he goes about half an hour ago to fetch her. Decides she must have forgotten. Forgotten! Well, he's hardly out of the place before she comes sailing in like the figurehead on the good ship Venus. And of course within two minutes of coming into the most crowded room in the county with a queue six deep at the bar, she's sitting in the corner surrounded by drinks. Just wait till Arthur gets back.' Sid drew a couple of pints for a complaining customer, then looked over at Gwen Evans again. 'Mind you,' he said, 'what a pair of bristols, Jesus! There hasn't been anything like that in here since Nancy Jennings went off with that traveller. And Mary James Connon, I mean – was the only thing I've ever known who could have beaten it.'