Pat Barker - Life Class

‘Don’t know.’ She jerked her head towards the stairs. ‘I’ll see how things are.’

She was hugging her upper arms, though it wasn’t cold. For the first time since he’d known her she seemed vulnerable, not dashing at all, a little half-starved cat. He put his arm round her. ‘I’m really pleased about the scholarship.’ He hesitated. ‘Elinor …’

‘I know what you’re going to ask and the answer is I don’t know.’ She looked uncomfortable. ‘ Yes, probably. But it was ages ago. Nev’s a troublemaker, you know that.’

He nodded. ‘Yes, I know. I’ll see you later.’

It was nothing to be miserable about, he told himself, walking off down the street, merely the confirmation of something he’d suspected since their first evening. What happened before they met didn’t matter. It was far less important than the threat — if there was a threat — from Halliday.

That Saturday there was a fair on Hampstead Heath. He asked Teresa to go with him but he wasn’t surprised when she refused. Instead, he arranged to go with Elinor and Ruthie, and with Ruthie’s friend Michael Abbott, a cheerful, sociable, self-confident young man who spent hardly any time in classes and yet never seemed to doubt his ability as a painter.

They met at Elinor’s lodgings and went up together on the bus, sitting on the top in the open air. This was the first day that felt like summer. Paul managed to sit next to Elinor. As she twisted round to speak to Ruthie, her knee pressed into his thigh under the rain apron. He glanced at her sideways but she didn’t seem to notice. She was full of life, carefree, and suddenly his affair with Teresa seemed limited, shadowed by the bitterness of her marriage that he pretended to understand, but couldn’t. The cabbage leaves and the dark hole behind the dustbins seemed to epitomize everything he’d begun to dislike. But then he remembered the sound of the trains, the vibration of the bed as they roared past, the way Teresa’s skin gleamed in the candlelight.

‘Hoy!’ Elinor waved a hand in front of his face.

‘Sorry I was miles away.’

‘I know where you were. Couldn’t she come?’

‘She wanted to go to the Café Royal. I fancied a change.’ His words hung on the air, silence giving them a weight he hadn’t intended. Say something. Anything. ‘How about Neville? I’d’ve thought a fairground was just the ticket.’

‘He’s painting a factory in Leeds.’

He sensed coolness, but whether directed at Neville or at him — perhaps she found the question intrusive — he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. It was a summer evening, and warm, and they were going to the fair together.

At the fairground they stood on muddy trampled grass, breathing in smells of candyfloss, roasting chestnuts, chips, beer from the beer tents where men queued and carried away bottles, two or three in each hand. On the boat swings girls hung on to their skirts, shrieks of laughter slicing the air. They went on the swings first. He handed Elinor in and sat opposite her as the chocks were pulled away. Hauling on the tasselled rope they rose higher and higher. He saw her open mouth and knew she was laughing but couldn’t distinguish her laugh from the roar around them. At one point her skirt flew up. She squealed, like any shop girl on an outing, and he caught the hem and pinned it down with his foot. By the time their go was over he’d had enough and so had she, jumping down and swaying against him, so that her nose bumped against his shoulder. He took hold of her arms to steady her, she looked up at him and for a second they might have kissed, but Abbott, waiting behind him, said, ‘Hey get a move on. It’s our turn.’

They waited. All around overtired children whinged, mothers snapped and slapped, fathers took refuge in the beer tents, gangs of youths roamed about, braying, jeering, contemptuous, excluded. Paul wanted to get Elinor somewhere quiet and alone, but she and Ruthie stuck together as they always did. As soon as Ruthie got off the boat swing they were arm in arm again, strolling towards the merry-go-round whose grinning, blue-eyed horses rose and fell. When it stopped, Elinor said, ‘Aren’t you coming?’ Her skin was orange in the light of the naphtha torches, which cast shuddering shadows over the heaving ground. ‘No, you go.’ You could only ride three abreast and so Abbott was in his glory, with a girl on either side.

As the music started to play again, they laughed and waved and set off, slowly at first as the man went from horse to horse collecting fares, then faster, rising and falling, rising and falling. They seemed at one point to ride him down, Elinor straight ahead, unseeing, as he slipped and fell under the hooves. He was shivery, too hot and too cold at once, the awful warm gassy beer lying heavy on his stomach. He would wait for them to get off, he decided, then find somewhere to sit down. For a moment, he stopped looking at the horses and gazed through them to the other side. A man stood there, a tall man with a ginger moustache and a hat pulled down low over his eyes. What little could be seen of his face was a beaten bronze mask, expressionless in the light of the naphtha flares. Paul stared. The man stared back at him. He was alone, which seemed odd, but then perhaps he was waiting, as Paul was, for somebody to get off the ride. Aware that his stare was becoming confrontational, Paul made a deliberate effort to switch his gaze away. A second later, unable to help himself, he looked back and the man had gone, but so suddenly Paul was left wondering whether there’d ever been anybody there at all. It was all this nonsense with Teresa, he told himself. He’d spent so long staring at shadows, he was starting to imagine things.

By now he was feeling rather ill, but determined not to let it spoil the evening. The ride seemed to go on for ever, but at last he felt Elinor’s hand on his arm. He bought more beer because it was his turn, but the more he drank the worse he felt. They tried the Hall of Mirrors next, Elinor gazing at her reflection in the distorting glass, now tall, now short, now fat, now thin, all arms and legs one minute, all head the next. Like Alice in Wonderland. She even looked like Alice, with that short full skirt and her hair tied back with ribbon. Almost doll-like. He felt a spasm of dislike that came from nowhere and did nothing to lessen his desire.

Outside again, he said, ‘Do you mind if I sit down a bit? I’ll just be over there by the bandstand.’

‘Are you all right?’

Elinor’s face, looking up at him, seemed scarcely less distorted than her reflections had been. ‘I’ll be fine. I’m just feeling a little bit sick, that’s all.’

‘It’s the beer,’ Abbott said, gloomily. ‘I’ve never tasted anything like it.’

They went off to the Ghost Train, and Paul started pushing through the crowd towards the sound of a brass band. He felt adrift, disconnected from everybody and everything. Perhaps he should stop seeing Teresa. At the moment he seemed to be in a state where he was happy neither with her nor without her.

Despite the blaring music, the bandstand was a peaceful place. Many of the seats were empty. All around crowds of people surged from one attraction to the next. Sweaty faces under funny hats; fat men fanning themselves with handkerchiefs; children carried high above the crowds, their white, skinny legs clasped in their fathers’ meaty fists. A stench of horse dung, leather, petrol fumes, raw, wet earth, trampled grass. Everywhere, couples, some of them now beginning to leave the fairground to look for peace and quiet, passion rather, under the trees. He felt a swell of yearning for Elinor or Teresa or … No, no, no, neither of them, for some anonymous girl he could pick up by the swings and take outside and never see again.