Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

But on Sundays she locked up the shop and entertained the Vicar, the Rev. Arthur Lindsey, in a room which might have been designed as a stage set for the purpose. Dark oak furniture, plants with thick, durable, rubbery leaves — Ada had no patience with flowers, always drooping and dying — and, prominently displayed on a side table, the family Bible, open at a particularly fortifying text. In this setting Ada poured tea into china cups, dabbed her rat trap of a mouth with a starched napkin and engaged in light, or, in deference to the Sabbath, improving conversation on the topics of the day.

Billy Prior sat at the other end of the table, a concession to his new status as future son-in-law. No more material concessions had been forthcoming: he and Sarah had not been left alone together for a second. Though Ada was gratified by the engagement. She believed in marriage, the more strongly, Prior suspected, for never having sampled it herself. You don't know that , he reminded himself. But then he looked round the room and thought, Yes, I do. Photographs of Sarah and Cynthia stood on the sideboard, but none of the grandparents, none of their father. No portrait of Ada-the-blushing-bride. And the fortifying text she'd selected for display was the chapter of the Book of Job in which Eliphaz the Temanite visits his friend and seeks to console him for the plague of boils which covers his skin from crown to sole by pointing out that he had it coming. One thing Ada did have was a sense of humour. Oh, and an eye for male flesh. Yesterday he'd helped her hang curtains, and her gaze on his groin as she handed the curtains up had been so frankly appraising he'd almost blushed. You might fool Lindsey, he thought, but you don't fool me.

He made an effort to attend to the conversation. They were talking about the granting of the vote to women of thirty and over, an act of which Ada strongly disapproved. It had pleased Almighty God, she said, to create the one sex visibly and unmistakably superior to the other, and that was all there was to be said in the matter. From the way Lindsey simpered and giggled, one could only assume he thought he knew which sex was meant. He was one of those Anglo-Catholic young men who waft about in a positive miasma of stale incense and seminal fluid. Prior knew the type — biblically as well.

Sarah touched the teapot, and stood up. 'I think this could do with freshening. Billy?'

'Does it take two of you, Sarah?'

'I need Billy to open the door, Mother.'

In the kitchen she burst out, 'Honestly, what century does she think she's living in?'

Prior shrugged. From the kitchen window Melbourne Terrace sloped steeply down, a shoal of red-grey roofs half hidden in swathes of mist and rain. He wondered whether Ada had taken this house for the view, for the sweep of cobbled road, the rows and rows of smoking chimney-stacks, was as dramatic in its way as a mountain range, and, for Ada, rather more significant. For there, below her, was the life she'd saved her daughters from: scabby-mouthed children, women with black eyes, bedbugs, street fights, marriage lines pasted to the inside of the front window to humiliate neighbours who had none of their own to display. He could quite see how the vote might seem irrelevant to a woman engaged in such a battle.

Sarah came across and joined him by the window, putting her arms round his chest from behind and resting her face against his shoulder. 'I hope it's nicer tomorrow. You haven't had much luck with the weather, have you?'

Wasn't all he hadn't had. He turned to face her. 'When are we going to get some time alone?'

'I don't know.' She shook her head. 'I'll work something out.'

'Look, you could pretend to go to work, and—'

'I can't pretend to go to work, Billy. We need the money. Come on, she'll be wondering where we are.'

Prior found a plate of lardy cake thrust into his hand, and followed her back into the front room.

They found Lindsey confiding his ideas for next week's sermon — he was attracted to the idea of sacrifice, he said. Are you indeed? thought Prior, plonking the plate down. Cynthia, not long widowed, was hanging on every word, probably on her mother's instructions: she was by far the more biddable of the two girls. Sitting down, Prior nudged Lindsey's foot under the table and was delighted to see a faint blush begin around the dog collar and work its way upwards. A sidelong, flickering glance, a brushing and shying away of eyes, and… You're wasting your lardy cake on that one, Ma, Prior told his future mother-in-law silently, folding his arms.

* * *

After Lindsey had gone, Ada changed into her weekday dress and settled down with a bag of humbugs and a novel. She sat close to the fire, raising her skirt high enough to reveal elastic garters and an expanse of white thigh. As her skirt warmed through, a faint scent of urine rose from it, for Ada, as he knew from Sarah, followed the old custom and when taken short in the street straddled her legs like a mare and pissed in the gutter. His being allowed to witness these intimacies was another concession to the ring on Sarah's finger.

The young people gathered round the piano, and, after the requisite number of hymns had been thumped and bellowed through, passed on to sentimental favourites from before the war.

'You'll know this one, Ma,' Prior said, drawing out the vowel sounds, ogling her over his shoulder. Rather to his surprise, she sang with him.

For her beauty was sold,

For an old man's gold,

She's just a bird in a gilded cage!

'By heck, it was never my luck,' Ada said, going back to her book.

Prior glanced at his watch. 'Do you fancy a turn round the block?' he asked Sarah, closing the piano lid.

'Yes,' A quick glance at Cynthia.

'I'm too tired,' said Cynthia.

'You're never thinking of walking in this?' Ada said. 'Listen at it. It's blowing a gale.'

It was too.

'Anyway it's work tomorrow, our Sarah,' Ada said, closing her book. 'I think we'd all be better for an early night. Are you comfortable on that sofa, Billy?'

'Fine, thank you.' Except them's this ruddy great pole sticking into the cushions.

'You might try lying on your back.'

They'd have burnt her in the Middle Ages. Sarah brought down blankets and pillows from her bedroom, and, watched by Ada from the foot of the stairs, kissed him chastely goodnight.

It's my embarkation leave, he wanted to howl. We're engaged.

The door closed behind her. He wasn't ready for bed — or rather he wasn't ready for bed alone. He took off his tunic and boots, wandered round the room, looked at photographs, finally threw himself on to the sofa and picked up Ada's discarded novel.

Ada had a great stock of books. A few romances, which she read with every appearance of enjoyment, gurgles of laughter erupting from the black bombazine like a hot spring from volcanic earth. But she preferred penny dreadfuls, which she read propped up against the milk bottle as she prepared the evening meal. Fingerprints, translucent with butter, encrusted with batter, sticky with jam, edged every page. Bloody thumbprints led up to one particularly gory murder. All the books had murders in them, all carried out by women. Aristocratic ladies ranged abroad, pushing their husbands into rivers, off balconies, over cliffs, under trains or, in the case of the more domestically inclined, feminine type of woman, remained at home and jalloped them to death. Only the final pages were free of cooking stains, and for a long time this puzzled him, until he realized that, in the final chapter, the adulterous murderesses were caught and punished. Ada had no truck with that. Her heroines got away with it.

The clock ticked loudly, as it had done all last night, a malevolent tick that kept him awake. He picked it up, intending to put it in the kitchen, but it stopped at once and only resumed its ticking when he replaced it on the mantel shelf. For Christ's sake, he thought, even the bloody clock's trained to keep its knees together.